Just started painting my LoA figures. Beginning with the Dutch and have a slight confusion over colours for the Garde te Paard .
Sapherson gives them as "blue coat, blue cuffs with gold decoration, red horse furniture lined gold". However in Grant's "From Pike to Shotte" he refers to RED linings and in his Partizan press book on Marlburian armies, he repeats this. Is it possible that the uniform changed slightly between 1690 and 1704? Or is one of these authors wrong. What about the colour of the rolled blanket/cloak? I am tempted to do it the same as the horse furniture, but I suppose it could have been blue or even grey.
Figures are a joy to paint using black primer, dry brush white and then staining the colours with dilute acrylics.
Mark Allen's article shows them as Sapherson says, I think he is working from Sapherson in this instance, I'm not sure what the source is. There's a good chance that there may have been changes from 1690-1704, sometimes coats would change colour with a new issue of coats, simply because that's what the colonel bought for his regiment. This may well be less likely with such an elite unit, but a change in cuff colour is entirely possible, the Foot guards for instance have orange cuffs in 1690, which later seem to have turned to red during the Spanish Succession.
Mark Allen also shows red saddle cloth trimmed yellow/gold, and somewhat unusually buff hats. Rolled up cloaks are likely to have been blue. However the ordinary horse figures in the range don't quite fit this regiment, as they wear blue cloaks with loose hanging sleeves with William of Orange's cypher on the sleeve. I'll have to do specific figures for them at some stage.
Glad you're enjoying the painting, I'd like to see what sort of results you get with that technique; is it fast?
Hi Clibinarium- good to hear from the " horse's mouth", if you will excuse the term. A friend, having seen this post or a similar one on TMP, has just sent me some info from the Robert Hall CD. A print dated 1688 shows them with the hanging sleeves you describe. The 1690 and 1698 prints show a more conventional uniform, which is what you have modelled, very nicely I might add. I suspect the cassock with hanging sleeves may have been more of a parade dress than field dress, so I am quite happy to use the existing figures for my 1690 army.
I would like to do the dragoon regiment, but so far no mounted figures with fur caps- any chance of getting them in the near future? Would also like to see a horse grenadier figure!
The technique I am using is quite fast. I use it for 6 mm and 10 mm. I painted 200 plus Adler and Baccus ACW infantry in a week of evening sessions (about 10 hours in total) using this technique and I think they look pretty good.The advantage over straight black primer is that the raised detail is made more visible, so can be painted easily. The staining technique, using a diluted acrylic, allows the black to give shading, which obviously a white undercoat ( my preferred method for larger scales) does not. It also gives a bit more vibrancy to the colours. When I have painted a few units, I will try and post pics, if I can work out how to do it.