Raise high ze black flags my children! – The Prussian Army of 1813-1815

Better late than never, here’s some footage that finally made it out of the editing room.

Sadly its the only footage I got of this Year’s Partizan show, mostly as I was busy playing and putting on this demo game with other members from the club.

These are the few shots I managed to get towards the end of the day as the game came to its conclusion.

The project has been a bit quiet over the last few months despite me frantically painting a whole host of miniatures for it. The reason? My local club (Sheffield & Rotherham Wargames Club) decided to put on a game of General D’armee at this years Partizan.

For the game we chose to put on a scenario from the new 1813 Campaign book, in this case the Lutzen scenario. This resulted in a need for many many more miniatures to be painted.

Our initial setup of the table on the day ready and waiting for the crowds to arrive. We tweaked the scenario layout sightly based upon a combination of historical maps, satellite imagery and the scenery we have available.

The battle progresses, the Prussians struggled with hesitant brigades on the two flanks, resulting in a slow start. In the center they managed to take Gross-Gorshen from the French and just cling onto it throughout the game. The left flank sees some success managing to slowly push the french back but suffering high casualties in doing so.

One of the units I find myself needing is one of the Prussian Grenadier battalions.  These where formed by combining the Grenadier companies of the various line regiments across the Prussian army. Generally these where organised in the same way, there being a battalion for each province, in this particular case I’m interested in the Silesian Grenadier Battalion.

These wore the same uniform as their line infantry counter parts with one exception a plumed shako, in Russian style was worn by Grenadiers, however on campaign this was covered in a oilskin just like everyone else. On one hand this is great for gamers, no need for specialised miniatures, on the other hand its a bit of a problem as there’s no easy way to distinguish them on the table. Its also quite nice as a hobbyist to paint something a bit different that has the added benefit of working on the table top.

Armed with an example image and a desire to do something different I then got thinking how this could be done.

No manufacturer that I know of makes either the grenadier head or a specific set except possibly elite figures.

With the Prussian uniform being effectively a copy of the Russian uniform a source of parts was pretty easy to find. Enter the Perry Russian Infantry kit, which conveniently I had three sprues laying around for and a nice made in Sheffield Swann-Morton scalpel.

Now the downsides, each sprue only comes with two of the older pattern grenadier heads that would work for this kitbash, for a full battalion i’ll need 16 sprues worth!

The Russian plume is quite a bit taller in appearance so I’ll have to cut these down and reduce the height.

I’ll also have to remove the various coverings on the shako, cords etc. and paint on the brass plate on the front.

Overall though I think this first attempt works rather well?

After a big break in  2022 the project is back, and bigger and hopefully better than ever.

The spring clean challenge seems like the perfect time to be progressing the project with my Napoleonic mojo clearly back what better than to break out masses of Prussians! That and a tight deadline of a demo game at Partizan 2023!

A small insight into how I’ve been approaching the project so far, generally I fully assemble, clean-up, remove mould lines a whole regiment at a time, in the past this has been 3 battalions each consisting of 24 figures, 4 figures to a 40mm base, and 6 bases to a battalion.

This has mostly remained the same, this time I’m focusing on a line infantry regiment, either to be the 1st or 2nd Silesian however I’ve made a change to basing and figure count, moving from 40mm square to 60x40mm, and only 4 bases, I’ve also increased the figure density, to 8 figures per base, leaving me with a battalion of 32 figures. To round this up to a bigger unit of 5 bases, I’ve added a small 45x40mm skirmish stand to the musketeer battalions, which will be useful for games such as Soldiers of Napoleon. Overally this gives a much denser look to the units, which I prefer, and something I’ve also adopted with cavalry, but more on that in a later post.

The result of this is I’ve given myself a tight deadline, and increased the number of figures to paint by 50%, wish me luck!

Progress has been somewhat slow over the last month due to work being busier than normal.

I have however completed painting the 3 battalions of the 6th Prussian Reserve Infantry Regiment, basing is still required however I’m planning on doing this in bulk.

Alongside the Wargames Atlantic Plastics and Perry Metal Command figures I’ve also painted a mounted office by Calpe, a fantastic figure, mounted this fits in very well with the WA figures and the sculpting is fantastic, with no mold lines or cleanup required and a joy to paint

Having experimented with airbrushing miniatures in their primary base colour I hit a problem of coverage. Some paints really don’t work well over the blue without a few layers, this usually wouldn’t be a huge problem, but when painting a large batch this quickly starts to double the painting time.

Culloden Painting Studio (a great youtube channel you should subscribe to) recently did a video that couldn’t have been better timed following the coloured prime idea. While my overall painting plan is a bit different he did use these “extra opaque” heavy game colour paints and I felt it would be worth a go.

Having found 3 or so colours I thought I’d like I quickly realised the cost put me off a bit, buying 3 paint generally ends up costing the same again in postage, so I decided to buy the full set of 16 for £33 off Amazon (I normally use a smaller store but in this case, I wanted to crack on).

So far I’ve been reasonably impressed, I’ve used several as base colours and all have covered well with one coat, I’ll be following up with another update once I’ve finished the Batallion and sharing some more thoughts on these paints but initial impressions are good and these look like a great timesaver.

I’ve now primed up the assembled 6th Reserve Regiment (minus some additional command).

I moved away from spray can’s to an airbrush for priming miniatures a few years ago and haven’t really looked back. Despite some early issues I’ve now got a pretty good system for priming my miniatures and it worked really well here.

As in the previous post, I assemble the miniatures and use blue-tac (poster tac) to stick them to tongue depressors (lolly sticks). Generally I try and get one sprue per stick, so six figures, in this case, this just provides a really simple way to check for duplicates when assembling.

Above are the three main stages I follow, these are:

• Initial prime with Vallejo Surface Primer Black
• Once this has dried (I usually give it a good hour) I follow this with a second prime of Vallejo Surface Primer Grey, this time with lighter passes and at a 45-degree angle, this leaves a good amount of back on the undersides and shadows.
• Finally, I follow on with a very quick highlight of Liquitex White Ink, from almost vertical, with a quick pass on the front and back.

I struggled for quite a while when first using an airbrush with it clogging, while I still have some issues, I’ve managed to overcome these with a few actions.

• Give it a good clean after use, I generally rinse the cup with water to remove any paint, then I run one or two cups (the bit you put the paint in) of clean water through it followed by around half a cup of airbrush cleaner.
• For the Vallejo primers, I used them at first out of the bottle, I’ve found that adding in thinner and most importantly a few drops of flow improver helps this massively, I don’t know the exact ratios but I have not more than 1/3 thinner and flow improver, maybe as little as 1/4, i also give these a good stir in the airbrush cup.

Wanting to stretch the bounds of my airbrush skills a bit I decided to basecoat the third battalion, who have a full blue uniform, using the airbrush.

I think the result looks very effective and really shows the benefit of zenithal priming. Hopefully, this will continue to look good as I start painting the miniatures.