42nd Highland “Black Watch”

This is actually the third time I have painted the “Black Watch”. The first time was for a Sci-Fi game called Battletech, but those minis were sold off almost a decade ago, when I turned my back on Sci-Fi.

The next one was a mechanized platoon for my modern troops that I did in 2002 or 2003 and they are still performing a stalwart service. I guess I will have to take a few shots of these in the near future and post them as well.

Now these guys were begun late last year, with about a third of them being painted this side of New Years. They are meant to represent the Regiment at both Quatre Bras and Waterloo. To this end, I simply painted enough for the former and will simply remove stands when playing the later. The minis are all Victrix. They are great for this purpose since I wanted to bases to look like the men have formed square. So I needed a kneeling front rank  and a rear rank in firing or loading poses. The Victrix sets gave me all that.

The big downside were the kneeling minis. Had I known beforehand how *bleeping* hard it would be to paint a tartan pattern on their kilts when you can hardly get the brush in between their arms… well I would have settled for marching poses!

As one might see, this regiment has always held a special place in my heart, so I knew by hard, that the hackles on their bonnets did not have the standard colour coding. The one thing that gave me headaches were the kilts. While the regiment is supposed to wear Government pattern tartans, some sources say, that the grenadiers had red stripes added to their pattern. Since these sources were the minority and I could not find a clear timeframe for this practice, I decided not to do that. One the other hand a good number of sources say, that the pipers wore Stewart pattern. While it was hard to verify this or not, I decided to simply do it. The piper was in my last batch of 4 minis together with the mounted officer and ensigns and by this time I was so sick of the government pattern, that I simply needed a break.

Black Watch

Command Base

Colour Guard

Drums and Bagpipe

As you can see from the different backgrounds, these shots were taken in two different sessions. If like either better (white background or scenic background)… please tell me. I will try to keep this in mind for future posts.

By the way… these minis were entered into the 34th Steve Dean painting competition. They came second in their group, which meant they advanced to the main competition (only the second time ever one of my entries did so). Unfortunately they were then kicked out in their first match-up. Which was no big surprise, since the quality of the 34th competition was amazing. So I am glad I even came this far!