Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

Hot on the heels of the British foot regiment I recently completed, here's my first Sikh unit, a regiment of dragoons. Once again these are Newline Designs figures. I'm new to this period, but Newline seem to have a comprehensive range so I can get all I need from them. Bought as a unit deal they cost £9.80. Yes, £9.80 for 9 cavalry including horses and command figures. Bargain. I did some minor conversion work on these. The officer has a head from a Sikh infantry NCO as I wanted to give him a fuller turban rather than the smaller style he was sculpted with. And three of the troopers have had their beards lengthened with green stuff. You can't have too big a beard! These seemed to take a long time to do. I stuck the riders to the horses before priming and I'm not sure if this was the best thing to do. It's been a long time since I painted any cavalry larger than 10mm and I wasn't happy with the horses, so kept fiddling with the shading and highlights. I still n...

The First Anglo-Sikh War is yet another conflict I've been meaning to "do" for ages .  I actually bought and completed a couple of packs of Newline Designs figures quite a few years back. But true to form something else diverted my attention. Anyway over the last month or so either side of holiday, I've managed to complete my first unit - a British regular regiment loosely based on the 31st Regiment of Foot. These are Newline figures in 20mm scale. I'm a big fan of 20mm or thereabouts (be it 1/72 or 1/76) and a big fan of Newline.  The service from Sean Pereira is excellent and these are very nice figures at a ridiculously competitive price of £9.80 for a regiment of 24,  19 rank and file and 5 command figures. 40p a figure.  Come on you can't go wrong with that.  For maximum flexibility for different games, these are based individually on 15mm square bases. They're on three 4x2 movement trays, all from Warbases . The bases were covered in my usual sand m...

You can read week one here . Day Eight (30/05) Having got the bases to a reasonable point, albeit still far from finshed, I had planned to get on with the trees today. However, when I sat down at the painting table I changed my mind and decided to get the bases done and dusted. To start I glued two different shades of static grass onto the bases.  I was quite careful with this, sticking patches on to link or break up the flocked areas. Close up of two large bases with two shades of static grass added Once the grass had dried I added two different shades of finely chopped lichen onto the bases. As with the static grass this was quite deliberate. I took some care to glue some lichen round any bigger stones. With lichen added Next I stuck  some self-adhesive static grass of three different heights and three different shades onto the bases. I used moss, green and battlefield mix all from Tajima . I then finished off by adding some self-adhesive bushes.  After a break for anot...