Week 1 Results

Well. This was a successful week despite some distractions. As I said last week the main intention behind this blog was to motivate me to paint up some of the leadpile at a rate of ten figures a week in 2010. Unfortunately, my procrastination led me to leave actually starting the project until the end of January (Week 4 of 2010), so I was already 40 figures behind schedule when I first started the exercise.

The prime distraction this week was not so much the joy of seeing a webpage that I had created appearing on the Net (believe me the joy of Blogger is that it's designed for idiots - and I'm bang in the middle of their target demographic!) but the associated fascination of another Google product: Google Analytics. I can only describe this product as genius (at least the half of it that I understand - there's a whole new vocabulary to be discovered here that is only loosely related to English!). Google Analytics lets you see how many people visit your site, where they come from (both physically and from whence on the internet), how long they stay, and how many people take one look, decide I'm not very interesting and go away again (this is called the "bounce rate" evidently).


I have to say that for the first two or three days I was totally hooked on seeing how many new visitors had come to see what I had to say (or more probably just to look at the pictures) and where they had come from (the Analytics programme can tell you what city or region someone hails from, and not just what country). I mean, I had never heard of Valparaiso, Indiana until Wednesday!


Anyway, despite all that, I managed to exceed my target by painting 14 figures and and make a sound start on a further 12 British Peninsula Line Infantry such that they may be finished early in the coming week.

I did consider taking a leaf from Giles' book and not posting a picture until I had completed and properly based the whole battalion - but then thought that anyone who is reading this would die of boredom in the interim. In the picture above you can see this weeks efforts - the start of a French line infantry battalion. The grenadier company stand is made up of four AB and two BH figures (I had a couple that I had already painted so I popped them on - I'm not counting them towards my target by the way). The BH guys are much smaller if you stand them side by side with the AB (or OG French Line Infantry come to that) individually but if they are painted in the same style I don't think they look too out of place on a stand. The two skirmishers are by BH again and would be fine for "Marie Louise" troops as one guy is barefoot (a not uncommon occurance on campaign). The standard bearer and officer were part of an eBay lot and I believe were originally painted by Dragon Painting Services - again they are AB figures.

The stands are obviously unfinished but are 30mm x 30mm MDF from Timecast for the main body and 30mm x 20mm for the two skirmishers. This leaves the voltigeur company (I've made a good start on the first two figures for this) and two further centre companies to complete - I also need four more skirmishers to complete the set. So, we are talking 22 figures to go (I have a painted drummer I can pop on the command base to fill it out).

One thing that is left unpainted is the guidon (actually, looking at the pictures I can see a couple of other errors / bits missed) - I'm not sure how this arrangement worked in practice: I would have thought that the easiest thing to do in reality was to just shove a small pole with the flag on it down the barrel of the musket (and remember to remove it before you fired!)- but it doesn't look as though that is what is modelled on the figure - does anyone have any idea just how I should handle this?

Overrall I'm fairly happy with how these came out - as you can see, I am neither gifted, nor fast in the painting department.

Here is a picture of the Napoleonic box - although I'm pretty sure I have some other Napoleonic stuff around "somewhere". If you don't recognise the name - Imperial Miniatures were the name that AB was marketed under in America, as I mentioned before I bought a large joblot of figures from a guy in California and he must have had them for years himself. I also have an ACW box that is slightly smaller - but more tightly packed - and a 15mm AWI carrier bag, a 15mm WWII carrier bag and a lot of other stuff.

I shudder to think how many weeks at 10 figures a week that lot represents....