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| Cossack infantry advancing |
Invigorated by the excellent progress being made on the GNW Supplement for BLB, I treated myself to some painting which was not actually on the very backlogged schedule.
In addition to the painting I did some more reading on Cossacks and found that over the years I had fallen into swallowing a few cliches about them. Perhaps it was too much exposure to the Battleground hex based Napoleon in Russia computer game or, believing all the Taras Bulba hype.
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| Cossack infantry Command - The Hetman is particularly fine as is the hat waving Ivan! |
For some reason, I had missed the fact that much perhaps the majority, of a Cossack army was composed of infantry which preferred to fight from the protection of defences.
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| All together now! You can just hear them singing 'Stenka Razin!' I learned that at Primary school! |
The Sword & Flame army guide appears to suggest that the mounted component of a force was a relatively small minority compared with the musket armed or levy element. Wagons also seem to have played an extremely prominent role.
As a sub component of larger armies such as Swedish, Polish-Lithuanian or Russian, perhaps mounted Cossacks and their role as skirmishing light cavalry was more prominent but in the context of 'All Cossack' infantry seems to have been the mainstay.
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| Closed up a bit for wargaming effect - A Donnybrook force ready to go. |
When painting these I was very careful to avoid bright and garish colours and also, pure white and black. All tones used are in the sombre palette selection and several washes down have been used to suck up brightness.
The poses are very nice, the painting was very easy and enjoyable and the results for me anyway, were pleasing.
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| Over running a gun position - Muscovite? Ottoman? Polish? Swedish? They fought everyone! |
I only have the briefest amount of time to take pictures and unfortunately didn't get round to a flag. The set up shot in terrain was also a quickey but creates the idea on which I'll build on my return from the three-weeker I am currently committed to.
Aha, I hear you ask... when will they be available? Well, I am not sure what the demand might be but they are ready to get production cast now more or less. Let's see what the response to these picture is. That might speed things up somewhat.