Wee Painted Men - Wargaming with Miniatures: landwehr

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Prussian landwehr (militia) cavalry - finished!

Although I haven't posted a huge amount of painting updates in the past few months, I am still chipping away at the lead pile, adding extra bases to existing units and generally rounding out certain parts of the Prussian and French armies (mostly Prussian though).

The most recent addition was another 6 figures to the Prussian landwehr cavalry, which takes the total to 18 figures and should be enough for most games/scenarios. I also decided to revert back to using two-figure bases (30x30mm) to give more flexibility. Rebasing wasn't as much of a chore as I'd feared. Soaking the MDF for about 24 hours softens it up nicely, and I only had a couple of minor repairs to do in the course of it.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I really do like the figure of the landwehr colonel (picture in the front rank next to the bugler). All in all, very nice minis once again from Newline Designs, with just the right amount of detail for my tastes.

Seeing as the camera is set up today, I'll take some more photos of the other units I've been working on, and upload these soon.

Next up will be to get started on those excellent buildings from Total Battle Miniatures you see in the background. They should look even better once they're painted up.

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

East Prussian Landwehr Cavalry

So, my first unit of Prussian landwehr cavalry is now finished. I have one other lot of 9 miniatures still to paint, which will probably be done in the not too distant future. As with the French chasseurs, I've gone with three figures on a 45x30mm base, which is also handy for making the most of the Newline Designs unit packs, which contain 9 figures.

Rather than painting another Silesian regiment, I decided to paint these guys as an East Prussian, so it was nice to paint some red collars etc rather than yellow. The central figure in the command stand is actually a landwehr colonel, which I bought separately from Newline and swapped in for one of the regular troopers to add a bit of variety.

I'm rather fond of the landwehr portion of my Prussian army. I think it's the uniforms that appeal to me. They're simple but look good once painted up, and a bit more colourful than the regular Prussian line infantry. Apart from the other pack of cavalry, I still have one more unit of foot and that'll be the landwehr finished for now. No doubt I'll want to add more in the future, but this will be enough for the time being.

Currently on the painting table is a base of Prussian reserve infantry, which I decided to do next in order to experiment with how a 6-figure base looks agains the 4- and 8-figure bases I've used so far. I'll post pics of these and the other completed reserve infantry units in the next post.

Bye for now!