Apologies for the long silence on these pages. I’ve been quite busy. In 2025 I’ve had two games of Général d’Armée at the club, one with my figures, and one based in 1800 with a fellow club member. I’ve been working on some new ideas for my WW2 rules, some of which I will apply to other periods. And I’ve been busy painting reinforcements for my 18mm Prussian army for 1813 to 1815. I’ve also revamped this website, though not so sure about how much better it is. Today I am going to describe my new Prussian artillery an d limbers; next time it will be the turn of seven battalions of infantry.
I started with the artillery, not because I had any special need for my GDA2 games, which are not intensive of artillery, but because I had been planning this as part of my Ligny project – for which I will use my own grand-tactical rules – which use a lot more artillery models by comparison. I had gone as far assembling all the figures and models ready to complete this aspect of the project a year ago – but then got distracted. I actually finished this in January, but not got round to photographing the results – I am actually a bit vague about what I did! There are ten bases of deployed artillery – three horse artillery, two heavy artillery, four field artillery and one howitzer. In my system I denote horse artillery with two-figure bases (and the howitzers too), field artillery with three crew figures, and heavy with four. The historical batteries were all the same size – 8 guns. In addition I painted eight limbers – three with two pairs of horses, and the rest with one.
The first image shows the heavies on the left and one of the field batteries on the right. The figures are all AB – much nicer than the Old Glory ones I have been using before. The 12 pdr pieces are also AB; the one on the right (in paler blue) was not painted in this batch, but left over from before. The 6 pdrs are Blue Moon – these are chunkier than the AB ones, and I’m using them for foot artillery. Apparently there was a bit of variation in Prussian artillery in use.
The next picture shows three horse artillery bases (far left, and both on the right) and the howitzer. The base on the left is meant to represent a battery from the Lützow Freikorps , which was still wearing the old uniforms in 1815. These are old Battle Honours Austrians with head swaps from Old Glory Prussians. Nothing very impressive, I have to admit. All the artillery pieces are from AB, with the howitzer in the lighter colours of my earlier batch. Incidentally I replaced the howitzer barrel with one from a Battle Honours Austrian 7pdr howitzer, and the AB one appears to represent the heavy 10-pdr howitzer.
What to say about the techniques used? The bases were cut from some packing plastic that I had lying around, after trouble with cardboard (even mount board) warping on bigger bases. They worked out in the end, but the material is too flexible and not very easy to glue. I needed to fix the magnetic material on the bottom early, and cure on a steel surface to make sure they were flat. In future I will use polystyrene plasticard – more expensive but more reliable. The figures were finished in the fast-drying oil medium I have been using before, with some raw umber mixed in – but the result is a little too glossy for my liking. Next come the limbers:
I have used Blue Moon Prussian heavy limbers and limber horses (with riders) for the foot artillery. The two horse artillery limbers – at the left end, are Minifigs – whose more dynamic pose works better for that arm (though I’m not a fan). AB limbers are works of art but fearfully expensive. For bulk buying wargames use Blue Moon are a much better source. If I didn’t have substantial numbers of Minifigs horses and riders already in stock (from more than a decade ago when the choices were more limited) I probably wouldn’t have used them. To date almost all my limbers have been with a single pair of horses (which would only have been used for manoeuvring – two or three pairs was the norm for normal use) – this because I was worried about the table space they would take up. This is not an issue for GDA2 games, so I have introduced a few larger models with two pairs (though without any attempt to represent the tackle).
I tried a new technique for the horses. I built up the colour in thin glazes of acrylic on a white base, using acrylic airbrush matt varnish as the medium. I thought this might give the horses the more luminous quality I have been searching for. It was a lot of faff for not especially striking results. I will be back to oils next time – have picked up one or two ideas from Yarkshire Gamers’ You-Tube tutorial. The horses will need a bit of touching up – in the hurry to finish I forgot the white markings. Looking at the photo I also notice than one horse doesn’t have the tackle painted.
The bases were covered in my usual sand and acrylic medium mix, coloured with white and raw umber for a pale dried mud colour. This is then covered with a mix of flock and sand to give a rather paler green-beige ground that in my earlier efforts: dark bases don’t show the miniatures to best advantage. Though the strong PVA adhesive I use to fix the flock mix is pretty good, I still felt that it could do with fixing with a mix of PVA and water. I thought mixing a bit of raw umber paint in would help bring out the texture. Disaster – the paint made the bases too dark. I tried rescuing with a bit of light brushing with beiges and lighter green. The result is OK but not great.
That may finish my Napoleonic Prussian artillery for all time. I have lots of it.
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