Old Guard & a Note of Caution

 Hi Everyone!

Here are some pictures of recently completed French Old Guard from North Star Military Figures Retreat From Moscow range.

Plus, just a heads up in case you hear of anyone claiming to be me on FaceBook or Messenger - it is not me. I closed my account with them last year and no longer use either of those services. The only places I can now be contacted are via this blog, my YouTube channel, or my email. I believe I have shared my painting commission email address on the blog before, but for the sake of completion 'ere 'tis : jacksarge777 at gmail dot com 

17th Century Characters...mostly

 Here are some 17th Century character miniatures I finished recently. 

28mm metal, mostly from Wargamer Poland:

https://sklep.wargamer.pl/gb/

The odd one out is the Cossack looking  guy armed with a bolt action carbine - this is from Crooked Dice.

The assortment includes some Polish dragoons, French Musketeers and a Spanish fellow who bears a striking resemblance to the title character in the movie "Alatriste", as played by Viggo Mortensen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alatriste

The Wargamer Poland miniatures are superbly detailed, largely from their Anno 1666 range.

Victrix Carthaginians with War Elephant

 I finished these Victrix miniatures recently for a mate in New Zealand. Some of the components were left separate for safer posting - i.e., shields, extra javelins and elephant crew.

Shield and howdah make use of the excellent decals from Little Big Men Studios, they really set the figures off nicely.

Basing tufts are from "Leadbear's Tufts", made in Australia. 

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

Howdah crew and equipment mounted on temporary stands for painting.

Welsh Warband Reinforcements

 Finished these wee chaps from Gripping Beast today - took me a few weeks.

They are for a Welsh Saga warband. banners are from LBMS, tufts from Leadbear's Tufts.

I've had terrible trouble with taking decent photos for a while now. It seems that it has been an issue with the settings on my Samsung phone camera. The photos have been turning out almost cartoony and flat, even my wife noticed and commented that they really didn't show off the quality of the paint work. What you see in this post is my second effort at taking pictures of these miniatures. I gave up on the white background, as it didn't seem to be helping, turned off the "auto" functions in settings, and attempted to adjust everything manually. I used ISO100, manual focus, and tweaked the camera to compensate for the yellow cast of the light, moving it more toward the blue spectrum - previous efforts had produced a jaundiced skintone. To my eye the results are far better than what you would have seen in my last blog post, those photos had been "cartoonised" by the auto camera settings, (not sure if that is a word, but you get the gist). I'm thinking I may go back to my older backdrop for photos, which was a kind of muted sepia tone, neutral thingy - you can find it in my earlier posts.

I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Here is a link to the video about this project:

https://youtu.be/KdkU9NI_FH0