Do you remember summer this year? When it was hot and half of Sweden was on fire? Seems like aeons ago. Well, back then Warlord Games had a summer painting competition. I decided that why not, let's enter it!
I decided to paint a small unit of Polish Uhlans, using the plastic kit from Warlord for "Polish Light line Lancers".
I have three of those boxes - got two as a gift from my dear friends, and one that I bought myself before I got the presents. Oh, and I also have a set of "regular" lancers (identical sprues), that I was planning to convert with the heads from the Vistula Legion box.
Problem is that the figures are meant so be used as Vistula Lancers, not the uhlans from the Duchy of Warsaw. They aren't completely right for the lancers either, but even less so for Polish Uhlans. So I decided to make a few simple corrections.
First of all, elite companies wore "furry" colpacks even after 1810. However, this is easily amended since many units wore the czapka instead - and lets face it, it looked cooler.
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| Elite troopers. Have to say that my cellphones camera isn't that bad after all... |
The bigger issue is the jacket (the polish Kurtka was shorter than the french jacket on the minis), and some of the equipment (belts & lances). That last part can be explained by the fact that polish units used all sorts of gear, and quite a lot of it was french indeed.
The officer is completely off though. But hey, he's a officer, and the did almost what the wanted! Almost...
The jacket is a hard nut to crack. To be honest though, most of it is hidden by various equipment and since I was lazy, I did only some minor adjustments by shortening the tail and adding some green stuff to the front. Looking back, I could have filed down the tail of the jackets completely and added a simple turnback instead of keeping the current ones. Ah well, next time.
So the minis are not to be used as a formal guide to a typical Uhlan of the Duchy of Warsaw. Still, from a bit afar they look the part and most people don't know the difference anyway...hopefully.
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| I painted 8 men to use in Sharp Practice and Black Powder games. I recently realized that I need to paint another trooper for Sharp Practice, since the officer isn't part of the unit in that game. |
I painted them in the colors of the 8th regiment, somewhere around 1812 (though I plan to use them for the 1813 campaign as well). I based 90% of my research on a wonderful book on the Polish Uhlans written by Adam Paczuski with illustrations by Ryszard Morawski (from a publisher called Karabela). Hellishly expensive, but really inspiring.
But what about that Warlord contest that started it all? Well it seems that 1) having a baby, 2) experiencing the hottest summer ever and 3) having a job really doesn't give much time to paint figures. So I never finished them in time for the contest. A shame!
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| Elite company |
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| Troopers |
But it got me started, and that's something! I even managed to finish my 24 men strong Vistula Legion battalion. But that's for another update...
Hope you like the pics!
