Creating Custer and Cooke in 20mm

A Crow scout, a quick head swop and a bit of green stuff.

A dismounted Lieutenant Cooke. Off his horse but still fighting.

Another Crow scout, this guy will get a cardboard feather in his hat when dry to finish off his look.

Newline Design don’t do a mounted version of Custer funny enough, so I took a officer and swooped his head with a gun fighter. The head was a good match for Custer and a bit of green stuff helped with the buck skin jacket. I made his red scarf blow in the wind, should look dynamic when painted.

 Lieutenant Cooke mounted, this time I used the standard bearer in his buck skin and added Cooke’s big sideburns.

Here we see the figure from the gun fighter set that makes for a good Custer. I carefully removed his head with a hobby saw and gel superglue did the rest.

A good nights work.

The big man himself with his personal guidon. I’m happy with him as I think it looks like Custer. The gun fighters hat was nice and big a perfect size for Custer’s.

Above, Crow scout

As the Newline Design range is rather limited I bought some of their 20mm ACW confederate cavalry to bolster the poses. They mix is really well with their slouch hats. They have sabres which is a problem but I found that even the figures from the Little Bighorn range have sabres too, so I’m not that bothered. The main thing is all the new poses attained by including the new sculpts.

I’ve added a few neckerchiefs to tie them in to the Newline Design Little Big Horn range. 

Not so keen on the sabre but he will do for a command base. Custer’s regiment handed in their sabres before the campaign started, just another detail that the guys at Newline Design over looked. Not a real problem, only for those nerds out there like me who like to research stuff.

A pistol was added to this guy to make him look a bit more ‘7th’.

The Crow scouts complete with hat feather. Thinking about it I will probably put these two on the same base.

As well as ACW figures, I also bought the pack of gun fighters and some of these made for good cavalrymen. Neckerchiefs helped with the look again. A lot of the cavalrymen were dressed in various clothes for the campaign,  troopers in shirts will add to the ad hoc look of the regiment.

A hardened gunfighter with a Henry rifle and two ACW troopers join the 7th cavalry at Fort Lincoln. 

.A Confederate cavalryman becomes an officer in the 7th with a snazzy new fashion accessory. 

British Rocket Battery 20mm 1879

The great thing about working in 20mm is you can paint things up very quickly. I seem to blast through these little chaps even with their fiddly details. I have to say I really enjoyed this little side project and it even got me looking at my 20mm 7th cavalry stuff again.

I love the fact that some officers wore blue patrol jackets, it makes for a much more interesting scene.

This scene in the film was the main influence behind creating the unit, let’s hope they do better on the board than they did in real life.

I decided to base them on 40mm circular bases so they could turn and face different directions and still look together as a unit.

I bought two pack mules from Irregular Miniatures and they seemed to fit the bill nicely. 

Small stones from the garden were added to act as pale rocks in the arid African grasslands.

A nice little project this one and the figures painted up well.

 

Creating Russell’s Battery in 20mm AZW

A friend of mine has started a 20mm Anglo Zulu war project using the great range from Newline Designs. The range is actually very good, covering most of the troop types needed for a good game. One item they don’t have though is the rocket troop made famous by the film, Zulu Dawn.

He mentioned this to me and I thought it would be a lovely surprise to make him one.

My very early thoughts were to cut a block of bolsa wood and have do, at that scale it should be fine I thought. However after a bit more thought I come to the conclusion, if you’re going to do something, do it right. So I hatched a cunning plan to actually see if I could make something that could pass as historically accurate.

I found a nice length of plastic sprue from an warlord Games orc set and that became the trough of the launcher. Rather than worry about filing a ‘v’ in it, I decided to paint it in. I figured at that scale it would look okay. It worked out better than I thought it would.

I used the artillery figures from the range as a guide to how big to make it.

The legs were created by cutting and bending paper clips. The Hales rockets were cut from a 28mm lead spear and filed to shape. Not bad I thought, a little crude but a lot better than a block of bolsa wood!

This collectors set of figures was a good help with scaling the models and also the colour of the launcher. I decided it must be artillery blue as in the Napoleonic wars, so used my handy Foundry triad paints to paint it.