Restoring a French Napoleonic collection.

I have planned to continue experimenting with the campaign rule set and use the three invasions of Portugal as a backdrop. The next step was to place an order for British and Portuguese as I have a large French collection. However, after reviewing the French I was amazed how much my style of painting has changed.

I believe the French were painted nearly twenty years ago when I used ‘pastel’ colour, so blue coats were nearly a Bavarian blue and the overall effect was quite bleached and depressing.

The thought had crossed my mind to sell the lot as is, abandon the Napoleonic period and move the campaign tests to another era. To keep or sell was the question. In either case an inventory was needed after which produced a final total of 140 elements of infantry, artillery, cavalry and general officers.

I decided to test the amount of time needed to ‘refurbish’ the collection and divided the lot in seven batches; line and light infantry with artillery for the first five batches and cavalry and some line infantry for the last two.

Basically, the coats became darker, all Mithril Silver bayonets and barrels were now Kohl Black and later dry brushed, backpacks now have three shades of brown as do the rolled up coats, shako covers were painted darker to bring a better contrast when highlighting. The end result did bring them up to a current standard and took maybe five or six hours spread over two days for the first test batch.

At the time of writing I am finishing up batch number five and will start probably Monday on the last two. These contain all the mounted units.

Reviewing the invasion forces for Portugal I will need Dragoons and combined elite companies which formed the grenadier battalions at Bussaco.

I should have new photos at the end of the week.