15mm American Civil War Reb Cavalry

Here's something I've been wanting to get worked on for a while.  Some American Civil War (ACW) 15mm figs... specifically Confederate (Reb) Cavalry.  We've talked in our gaming group about a larger sized cavalry engagement sometime, which would be fun to do, but think all the guys are gonna have to contribute some figs to get that done if we want to have enough on the table.

I've got a whole lot of packs of Old Glory 15mm figs, so could probably paint for a couple years to get them all done... come on retirement!!  And I also don't do as much during the warm spring and summer months as I'm usually outside working around the house or enjoying some libations on the back deck while watching our dogs and the neighbors cows.

For Cav units the horses and riders come separate, so you can either mount the figs then paint or do them separate.  I like the latter and prefer to paint separate.  To do this I mounted horses to tongue depressors, four or five in a row and that worked pretty well for painting.  I just alternated some color variations of red-brown, dark brown, gray/white etc, and then added some white blaze the the chest, head, or forelegs. I thing painting the tack and harness took a bit more time.

 For the soldiers, I needed a way to pick them up and handle them, and rotate them to paint.  I got a piece of 2x6 wood, drilled out a bunch of holes to fit dowel rods into, cut the dowels to about 4 inches or so, and wallah, a nice holding block that I could pick out a figure, pick up the dowel, paint on the figure, then put it back the dowel back in the block and move to the next figure.  I did the painting all more or less assembly line doing like items as I went along, ie. all skin, all hats, all shirts, all pants, all swords etc.

The harder part was that the pack of figures I used had about half regular uniformed Cav soldiers with pistol and carbine, and the other half of riders irregulars with flop-hats, civilian jackets, pistols and shotguns.  The uniformed guys were obviously a bit easier as all the uniforms were pretty much the same.  The irregular Cav needed some imagination for color combinations to vary the jackets, pants, hats, and chaps, so not quite so quick.  Afterward I added yellow piping for the uniformed Cav's leg stripes, cuffs, collars, and hats, and even managed some arm stripes to give a bit of rank to a couple of the boys.  Gotta keep some Sergeants to keep the discipline when the butter-bar lieutenants loose it.

I finished with basing everything up, and all in all I like the way they turned out.  Whenever you do something for the first time there's that learning curve to figure out what you like and the best way to do it.  I'm looking forward to getting some line units done, but still have several packs like this of Cav units.  I might have gone a bit overboard when I first was buying them. Hmmmm... Nope... Maybe?