Old Essex Parliamentary cavalry

I love these old figures, they are everything you want in Roundhead cavalry. They have great head sculpts and a nice big wheel lock pistol.

 These older figures come with a separate head and pistol arm, this means you have some subtle posing options. As these are old 25mm figures, I have mounted them on 2mm MDF cut offs, just to make them stand a bit taller. This will help tie them in with newer 28mm sculpts from other manufacturers.

The subtle posing can be seen here 

Here we can see an officer from 1st corps and an old Essex figure, with the extra height they now scale together very well. Also, these are heavy troopers on big horses, they should look a little imposing.

Here we can see the subtle height difference a bit of spare base can make.

Not sure who this is meant to be but he'll make a good Round head officer for the regiment.

Vallejo mud will hide the extra basing on the finished stand.

Luckily I had a few Essex horses in other collections so I could vary the poses. When this lot arrived from eBay they just had two .

They have resculpted these figures in recent times to a much inferior design. The new figures have smaller heads with a lame pot helmet design. I can understand why maybe, the separate heads are a source of weakness in the model. This can sometimes lead to heads being knocked off as the joint between the two isn't very deep.

However, the detail on these older models is far better. It's nice to have some space within the nasal bars for example, something that newer companies don't do. I have other Round head cavalry to paint but these are my favourites by far, as they look good in an ordered trotting line.

 I used the old royalist cavalry from Essex to creat standard bearers.

Well I couldn't resist moving these guys to the front of the que. I'm meant to be painting Royalists...but these old classic miniatures got me.

I've just discovered a great new paint for buff leather, it's the blonde hair triad from Reaper. The base colour is really good for buff with the highlights helping to shade it. Tamiya desert yellow is also a new favourite of mine too.

These have been given a coat of dark tone dip from the tin, now they are as tough as nails.

Four down, half a squadron, just the officer stand to go.

Update: I started on the command base today. I'm really liking the commander, he must be a very old sculpt as he's no longer on the Essex miniatures website.

Update: okay so now we have the full squadron painted and awaiting basing. I chose a set of nice white flags from Flags of war, I thought these ones were striking and would stand out nicely.

I will try to include more skewbald horses in the next squadron, they really give a flavour of the times.

Heavy horse.

I used a Sharpie to quickly black in any white left once the standard was stuck together. Nice and easy.