Unfortunately, my cancer means that I am unlikely to have the time, or frankly the desire to complete various large scale projects that I had started/thought about, but I thought you might like to see some of the ideas. I am adding units to my existing armies instead which seems a more sensible use of my time as I will hopefully once we are released from house arrest mean I can use them.
Italians
Sardinians
Sardinians
The first of these projects was
the Italian Wars of Unification. I
already had the Austrians and French so to some extent it was a matter of
producing some of the Italian states.
The Sardinian Lancer I made for John Cunningham’s Crimean War range gave
me some cavalry and the Bersaglieri a start with the infantry. I had also made an Italian General to lead my
army. I then created this ‘master’ for
the Sardinian infantry based on a picture from Uniformology. The French 1840’s Infantryman which John
already sells also works for Italian infantry of various states and the French
Guard from the CW range can also be used for Italian forces.
Papal States
I have a 25mm ‘S Range/mid range minifigs’ Zouave figure which makes an excellent Papal Zouave with the backpack swapped, or it can be left as it is.
I opted for a straight grey with red piping. I decided to cut away 'civil war' backpack the figure comes with file the back flat and superglue what I call the Jacklex backpack on the figure which more closely resembles the backpack in the pictures above.
The picture below show then with the fuller French backpacks. To get this figure in the past I had do a head swap of a kepi head onto Zouave figure.
In fact I have since discovered that jacklexminiatures.com have a separate backpack for the Foreign legion which does the job and is much simpler, again just remove the Civil War back pack and glue on the Foreign Legion one. I think this is a nicer figure than my original conversion.
This figure has proved to be very versatile from being a ACW Zouave to an 1870 FPW figure.
I have a mould for the original ACW figure and many casting which are no longer of any use! I intend to offer them to John Cunningham, and assuming he wants them you may be able to order from him.
Schleswig-Holstein War
Having already got a Prussian Army
I thought that I could build a Danish force for the first and/or second
Schleswig-Holstein Wars. A search on
Google left me totally confused as to what uniforms were for which war. I started with this picture.
This is listed as Danish troops
returning after the First Schleswig Holstein War. They looked very ACW but with a different
backpack.
So I converted a Union ACW figure
to make both an infantryman and a Grenadier and changed the backpack for a
Jacklex one.
I then came across picture of
infantrymen in red jackets and bell top shako and lost the plot about what I
should be trying to make and shelved the idea. The Friekorps troops I was going to use I turned
into civilians and were the subject of another blog.