Crazyredcoat's Crazy Compendium of Collected Creativity

It took me a lot longer than I would care to admit to come up with that title. Just not enough good trouser jokes… Such is life…

Anyhoo… I promised a rider for the horse, and work has begun! Because a lot of my uniform research is probably rather boring I thought I’d do posts on individual parts so that I don’t spam-post a lot of boring details. Or to be more accurate, I’m not that productive and the trousers were all I managed to do over an entire weekend. So going out of a limb, here, I’m going to assume you have all heard of this chap:

Now Mr. Sharpe is not known for riding horses. In the novels he is not very good at riding them. Read the books. They’re great. However, he wears Rifle Officer trousers here (though again in the books he knicked a pair of a dead Colonel of the Imperial Guard). The thing about Rifle Officers (and actually the first 2 Light Infantry Regiments (43rd Monmouthshire and 52nd Oxford), if I remember correctly*) is that they wore light cavalry pattern uniforms, but in green. The important part about all this, is the leather inserts to the inside leg and cuffs of the trousers. These are to prevent wear on the wool or canvas of the trousers. Long story short, it is going to chafe something awful if you had to ride a horse for a while with the crotch of your trousers worn away… Here’s some actual Troopers and officers showing the various designs that you should be able to make out the leather patches that Perry sculpt into the minis.

*As a small edit, I did further research and found that the 52nd (Oxford) Light Infantry officers wore regular pattern uniforms, whereas the 43rd (Monmouthshire) Light Infantry officers wore regular pattern uniforms, but added a red pellise and slightly different headgear. The Perry twins do an excellent 43rd command!

The trousers themselves can be canvas or wool, with the canvas being white and the wool being a grey colour. The white trousers were worn earlier in the war, but were also usually breeches with high riding boots rather than the grey wool trousers. Cavalry had a stripe running down the legs that coincided with their cording colour (yellow in the case of the 2nd KGL Hussars) which would be metallic for officers. The grey I went for is actually shown on the box art for the Perry Hussars, shown here:

And here, finally, is the finished piece. Or at least the trousers… Due to the problem of grey on grey, I did basecoat the dolman jacket and pelisse just to make the trousers easier to spot.

Also, as a question to those out there, do you find my reference research a bit daunting/annoying, and would you prefer some more painting tutorial focused posts? I can try and do some sort of middle ground, though Napoleonic British uniforms are something I can just go on and on about for days…