A Labour of...something

Hello again.

I chose the 43rd Foot as one of the regiments to feature in my Seven Years' War in America (aka French & Indian Wars) project for three reasons:

1. They were present at many of the actions in that war.
2. I had pictorial references available depicting uniforms and so on.
3. I wanted each regiment I painted for this project to have a distinctive facing colour, so all units were different in this regard, and their white facings fitted the bill nicely among all the buff and yellow of other regiments.

All went well during the painting of the rank and file, with which I have always commenced the units for this project, but then it came to the reversed colours worn by the musicians. I might dislike painting red, but how was I to do a white uniform without using a white undercoat, which I very, VERY RARELY even consider?

Now, back in the day, I painted an entire Austrian 15mm Napoleonic army's infantry units, all 15 of them I think, from a black undercoat and very decent they looked too (IMO). However, a single, 28mm "character" figure in a white uniform, painted up from a black undercoat and surrounded by a host of figures painted from a red undercoat got me thinking that it just would not look right. Hmm.

I took the plunge.

Now, there are many who swear by the white undercoat, but it has simply never worked for me. I never got my head around any sort of technique that left me with clear, delineated transitions between colours that I like, that meant I did not have to keep over-painting mistakes, etc. And that hideous sliver of white showing through where you could not quite get the brush...In short, painting figures only became a hobby when I discovered black undercoats (thank you, Kevin Dallimore!). White has been used exclusively for largely "white" or experimental things since then, such as skeletons, water elementals and Death Guard (mine are actually insipid green...it's a long story).

Anyway, I could see no satisfactory way around the white undercoat route for this guy, so away I went. For the first time also in this project, I chose to do the complicated regimental lace on this figure that British infantry regiments were adorned with to a greater or lesser extent at this time. I had just done "white" or "yellow" beforehand and will for subsequent units. But this guy needed something to offset all the white, so he got the blue dots/ squares (whatever they were in reality) on his lace, as worn in my main picture of the 43rd, as found in the Osprey "Combat" series book, "British Redcoat vs French Fusilier" by Stuart Reid. A double page spread of a soldier from the 43rd features on pages 12 and 13 and a whole camp scene of the regiment preparing on page 46. A little conjecture on the cap finished things off.

Purists may find a few issues to attend to, but I am happy with him, especially as he will join up with 23 of his colleagues very soon.

G

The viewpoint from which he will usually be seen, in the front rank of a regiment of 24 figures in two ranks of 12.

Hmm. A tad rough in places with the blue...

And thank goodness the drum shell was a simple affair!