Return to Picardie - and belated D-Day

A bit of a miscellany this time, as hobby time has been rather short, alas. I'm afraid it's been almost a year since Rob of Eastern Garrison fame was so kind as to sell me some rather nice 7YW period 25mm Garrison French, and to my shame I have done nothing with them,  Well, having completed enough WW2 figures to be going on with for the moment, I wanted to keep up the (tiny amount of ) painting momentum. My acquisitions of books at Broadsde the other week pointed me back to the 18th Century, so what better than to get some of these French painted? 

So, I have made a tentative start on the Regiment of Picardie - sixteen figures, which will make two units for The Portable Wargame. After a rather miserable and wet spring, the Longest Day has brought summer, and I was able to have my first outdoor painting session of the year, sat in the garden late  this afternoon. Progress was not exactly rapid, but I did slap some paint on to the general area of their coats! But what colour to use?  There does seem to be a slight dilemma - many sources suggest a plain white coat, but others posit the famous  Gris-blanc  or 'Grey White', carried over from the earlier armies of Louis XIV.  I decided on my own version of the Gris-blanc,  at least partly just to differentiate my French from my other white-clad figures, both Austrian and Saxon. Rather like an interior decorator, I've ended up with a sort of 'white with a hint of grey' produced by mixing Army Painter Uniform Grey with Titanium White. I was tempted at first to just leave the grey spray primer exposed for the coats, but that seemed a bit too strong - more 'Gris' than 'Blanc'. 

 

Not much to look at as yet, perhaps, but it's a start, and the figures are rather charming, with simple detail (not excessive) and better proportioned than the rather podgy  Minifigs that have made up most of my collection so far.  I think these will look rather elegantly chic, very French.. We'll see how I do with them. 

I can also report a slightly belated addition to the 'D-Day 80'  anniversary. My WW2 'D-Day Dodgers' project is by definition not about Normandy, of course, but I thought it would be nice to pay my wargaming respects of a sort to the event being commemorated  the other week. I have a copy of the boardgame Memoir 44 , so I thought I'd get that out, and why not use my figures and vehicles in place of those from the game?  Ideally  I would have set it up as a full-scale figures game, but alas I don't currently have enough hex terrain to replicate the full  Memoir 44 board, so I came up with a sort of boardgame/figures game mash-up, which didn't look too bad, I thought.  The model tanks only just about fitted into the hexes on the game board, but they were (just) OK.  

This is the 'Sword Beach' scenario, which was the obvious one to try given that I have British and German WW2 forces but no Americans so far! For infantry units I simply swapped my painted figures for the unpainted models in the game, for armoured units and artillery then one model gun or tank sufficed per unit, with artillery unit strength represented by the number of crew figures, and hits taken by tank units marked by simple tokens (pennies, in fact). And so to the game - the British pushed their 3 'DD' tank units up the beach promptly, using them to clear barbed-wire obstacles as they  went, but they took hits from the defending artillery ( in a protective bunker ) and the lone German armoured unit, and two of the three Sherman units were destroyed. However, weight of numbers ( and a few lucky hits on that artillery unit and other bunker-bound defending infantry ) told, especially in the central  sector.  After about a dozen turns a successful  British 'Close Assault' on the central village objective gave  the British their 5th and 6th 'Victory Medals' and finished the game in their favour - which was only right, I felt.  Here is the final situation, with the British looking very sparse on the left, but having pretty much cleaned up on the centre and right. I was glad to see a historically appropriate result,  and Memoir 44 proved to be simple, but challenging and fun.

Must get more Hexon terrain, and go for a 'proper' figures game version!

Finally for today, more D-Day - the ladies of the village handicraft group produced their most spectacular 'Pillar Box Topper' yet, in honour of the anniversary. Complete with landing-craft! 

That's all for now - as I said, this is a bit of an odds and ends post. I hope you'll forgive that, and I promise to keep on with painting those French! Meanwhile, keep well, everyone.