Regt. 'Prinz Hapnick' finished and first artillery

Well it has been a fairly unproductive week painting wise, the last five members of the first Hesse-Witten regiment and one artillery piece and crew, and unfortunately with work mounting up for my thesis it doesn't look like things will pick up anytime soon.

The musketeers 'Prinz Hapnick' in all their glory (click to enlarge)

This regiment has been an utter pleasure to paint. A few people enquired of me after my last post about what painting techniques I use. The answer is as few as possible! Most of the colours on my troops are simple block colours with no highlighting or washing, notable exceptions being the flesh and white areas. In general I feel that simple but careful painting, making sure to leave a thin line of black undercoat to define the edges of colour areas, achieves good results en masse.

Prinz Hapnick's officers and drummer (click to enlarge)

I'm going to have to say a few more words of praise for these Minden sculpts, they really are fantastic and surprisingly easy to paint. The detail is very clear and in most cases has good depth and so is easy to pick out with some careful brushwork. The figures have a lot of character too, and just seem so much nicer to me than the usual cast of peculiarly proportioned figures.

The colour party (click to enlarge)

I produced these flags using a combination of the free vector art program Inkscape and photoshop elements 6. They are printed onto 140gsm paper and then stuck onto the flagpole with good old PVA glue. I want to create unique regimental flags but tie units together with common designs or colours.

My first artillery, Minden gunners with a Berliner Zinnfiguren cannon (click to enlarge)

The artillery arm of the Hesse-Witten Freie Stadt's army is just in its infancy and their rather garish red small clothes have been chosen to give the branch a distinctive identity. The cannon is a Berliner Zinnfiguren 1760 Prussian 12 pounder, I saw this company's wares mentioned on Der Alte Fritz's excellent blog and they do indeed seem to be a perfect size match for the Mindens.

Another view of the gun crew. Feuer frei!(click to enlarge)