A Quick Mid-Week Update - Dutch-Belgian Cavalry in Progress

The 2nd Light Cavalry Brigade

Time for a quick mid-week update for you all on the painting table's progress. I've been slightly slower than usual this week due to being pretty busy in the evenings.

However, I had time yesterday to work on my Dutch-Belgian hussars. One regiment (8th Hussars) is finished, and I plan to get the final regiment done tomorrow evening before I go away for the weekend. All in all it means that the two Light Brigades of the Dutch-Belgian cavalry division will be completed.

Sadly the infantry I ordered from Baccus haven't been dispatched this week. Hopefully next week we'll be looking at completing the KGL and Belgians. I might even make some square formation markers.

Onto the pictures. Hussars always take a bit more effort to paint well, I've found, and the 8th were no different. Getting the right shade of blue for shabraques and uniforms was a bit of a challenge and I ended up going with this as the solution:

I painted the shabraques, dolmans and pelisses with Revell's Hellblau (Light Blue) paint, which is a little bit too light for the shade used by the 8th Hussars.

I followed it up by some experimentation with the Citadel/Games Workshop washes and glazes paint ranges.

GW Guilliman Blue glaze on the left, Asurmen Blue wash on the right.

I used Games Workshop's Guilliman Blue glaze on the figure on the left, which seemed to give the right, and most importantly, quite a light shade of blue. Whilst the Asurmen Blue (now called Drakenhof Nightshade) gave a similar colour, it darked the model down a bit too much.

Eventually with all the glazing done and the majority of the details painted they start to look damn good:

Finally, they all got cut off their strips and based. Tomorrow evening will see the majority of the cavalry given their proper basing and some decent non-paint table photographs taken.

Part of the reason why I enjoy 6mm so much is the feeling of scale that's created by the sheer number of figures on a single base which I don't get from 28mm. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the incredible detail and sculpts that come with the bigger scales but it doesn't have the same mass effect when a brigade are lined up.

Even with the mere 18 cavalry figures present in the brigade, I'm very happy with the way it looks. Once the two light brigades are completed I'll be very happy.

I should have another update on the progress of the cavalry division up on Friday night with some proper based photographs.

Until then, I hope you've enjoyed the post!