Empress Dragoon Trumpeter

Ok, this is the repainted figure, after being rescued from an overdose of black ink wash, the base still needs doing but otherwise I'm reasonably happy with it, considering it's the first painting I've done in at least 25 years and the paints were just some old acrylics and then there's my eyesight, anyway enough excuses, I'll try and do better next time.

In the meantime I've been sorting through the collection of figures and have decided to put some on eBay, mostly one's which were either my father's rather than mine or that aren't my main area of interest, which is to say primarily the Napoleonic Wars. The idea being to raise enough money to get some more modern acrylic paints such as Vallejo and possibly even to get some new figures, it would be nice to start one from scratch again.

Washout

Having repaired the dragoon trumpeter, I attempted to repaint it in the correct colours, it having originally been painted in the colours of a long since forgotten regiment, possibly of the kingdom of Naples or some other Italian state. Having achieved a result with which I was reasonably happy I just couldn't resist the temptation of trying some black ink wash on the white painted horsehair crest, which worked well but spilled on to the jacket, so I thought I'll try it all over the figure. Disaster! by the time I'd covered the whole model, the initial application of ink had largely dried, creating blotches all over the jacket, plus the ink was much too strong for the white lapels in particular. Anyway, after a further repaint of large parts of the figure I have nearly reached a satisfactory conclusion (again!) and learnt a salutory lesson in the use of ink wash on large figures.

Tradition

In my youth, many moons ago one of my hobbies was painting model soldiers and on a recent visit to my mothers house I decided the time had come to repatriate my collection of figures. However when I eventually found them rattling around loose in an old cardboard box I was somewhat disappointed to say the least at the state they were in, as a number of them were damaged or missing pieces. In the case of the Charles Stadden French Napoleonic Dragoon Trumpeter in the photograph, the trumpet was missing.

Surprisingly this 30 year old model is still in production, so I contacted the good people at 'Tradition of London' who still produce the Charles Stadden range of figures and asked if I could buy just the trumpet. I was delighted when Magnus Lindstrom replied and offered to send me one for no charge, which duly arrived a couple of days later, for which very many thanks Magnus.

There was one problem however, in the intervening years the design had been changed slightly and now the trumpet came complete with the trumpeters hand attached to it. The only thing for it was to amputate the the figures hand with the aid of fine saw, a dremel and a craft knife, once done I epoxied the hand with trumpet in place and achieved I think a very acceptable result. I have now set about repainting it in the correct colour scheme for an Empress' Dragoon Trumpeter, when it's finished I'll post a picture of the finished article here.