French Infantry

Things are a bit chaotic at the moment (at work and at home) and my small workbench is barely visible what with half painted figures, bottles of glue and bits of polystyrene and cardboard all over the place.  All the signs of frenetic multi-tasking.  Anyway, here are some figures that I finished last week or so: Italeri French Napoleonic infantry.

These are very nice figures and far outstrip any other 1/72 scale plastics I've seen (mainly on Plastic Soldier Review, rather than in the flesh).  Being later period figures they are wearing trousers over their breeches which makes a change from the old Airfix figures I have painted previously (see here and here).

I also took the opportunity to make them a bit more campaign style with some of them wearing brown trousers.  The poses in the packs are fairly static but they are nice and robust looking and the detail easily rivals things like the 28mm Perry plastics (in my opinion).  In fact these figures are actually quite tall, being closer to 25mm than the regulation 20mm.

There are voltigeurs and grenadiers in the mix but for my units I just painted them all as fusileers (although I left the red strips on the grenadiers' shakos - I may paint over them later).  I quite like the figure reaching back into his cartridge box, although from some angles he looks like he's massaging his lumbago.

Having bought two packets of these I can make six 16 figure units (based on 60mm x 20mm bases as per WRG 1685-1845) and because there are three officers, drummers and standard bearers per pack that means I don't have to scrabble around in my spares box looking for figures to convert for the command elements.

For information, my painting style for this scale (and 15mm) is to undercoat in black and then paint a shade coat (light grey for white areas) and then overpaint the main colour, letting some of the shade layer show through.  I'm not patient enough to do that whole three layer system thing required for larger figures.

For the faces I paint them a sort of rust colour and then dab four points of flesh on the chin, nose and cheeks, which does the trick.  Finally, I base them using coarse shelly sand stuck on with PVA glue, giving it a wash of dark earth, followed by a dry brush with a sand colour and then with some Javis flock added leaving plenty of earth showing through.