La Bricole Painting Competition (Part 1) / 4th Marine Regiment

A couple of days ago I stumbled over a nice little forum called La Bricole, which is completely dedicated to Napoleonic wargaming. Now they are running a painting competition right now, which is more of a friendly contest rather than anything else. All participants need to paint a unit of their choice, any given scale. The biggest rules are that you are not allowed to have started (except cleaning the minis and priming them) before the competition started around Christmas and that everything needs to be finished before the end of March. You can pick any unit as long as it is not elite (no guards, Rifles / Schützen / Jäger…).

I decided to pick the 4th Marine Artillery Regiment. Why… Well most of all, because I need to paint them for my Völkerschlacht / Möckern project anyway and since it would give me good reason to work myself through them at a reasonable pace, since I feel that this might be the unit that might get me bored most easily!

Since I only found the forum last week I am slightly late to the party, but on the other hand I have lots of time right now. So over the course of a couple of evenings I cleaned up the minis for this unit. Right now it is only the 1st battalion, but if I find the time, I shall try to do all 3 for the competition.

Marine Artillerie bei Möckern 1813

Marines and Brandenburg Hussars

Now at Leipzig these men were actually mistaken for Old Guard, since they wore dark blue greatcoats over dark blue uniforms. They had red epaulettes and pompoms, but wore shakos and (judging by some paintings I found) bicornes. Now this made the choice of minis easy. I used mostly Victrix minis from their Old Guard Grenadiers box with shakos from Victrix and Perry. A few men received the heads from the officers with slightly modified bicornes and one bicorne from Victrixs early infantry is in there, too. To add a little diversity there are also two plastic Perry soldiers in greatcoats and three men in normal uniforms. As you might be able to see on these poor shots from the various shades of plastic, all this came from a great number of boxes. They have now been cleaned up (a few slightly converted) and holes filled with greenstuff. After these shots were taken, I also primed them and I hope to put the first colour on them by tomorrow.

Minis before being primed

Skirmishers