Featherstone, Tennant and Higgs - Another Discovery and a Very Special WIP

As our nation's representatives in Congress prepare to vote a second time to impeach, I thought I would take some comfort in my hobby that has brought so much joy to me, and hopefully share a little joy with my readers.  Last month I received a package from Dick Tennant, which was the culmination of his lifetime of devotion to the hobby.  Amongst the items I received were these little gems.  Dick had reached out to me over a year ago asking if I wanted them and I had arranged for them to go to the home of a dear friend, Terry Webb.  As I found out more about the figures, I felt they were just to integral to the collection to break them apart from the whole, so with Terry's kind permission they have remained with me.

These miniatures were painted and designed by Dick Higgs, Design Director for Minifigs, and used on the cover of Donald Featherstone's book, Military Modeling.  The figures themselves were cast by Neville Dickenson, but never produced commercially by Minifigs, so as far as I know are unique.

I will have to ask Mr. Tennant how he came into possession of them, but it speaks to his early involvement with the founders of our hobby.

There have been some very slight adjustments to the figures since their debut on the cover of Military Modelling; the right hand on the rightmost hussar has been straightened to a more natural pose and the painting of his eyes corrected.  Some red striping has been added to the sword tassel on the leftmost hussar.  I will have to ask Mr. Tennant if those were some of his additions.

 

 After posting a story about the Tennant Collection I received a comment from Mark, over at the Man of TIN blog ( https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/22/richard-tennant-and-donald-featherstones-incomplete-wargaming/ ), regarding some additional connection showing the collaborative nature of the relationship between Tennant and Featherstone.  Below is an image from Featherstone's Complete Wargaming,with some of Dick Tennant's collection.  Mark's copy of the book is signed by Donald Featherstone and Inscribed to Dick Tennant!

 

Dick had indicated to me that photographs of his own collection had gotten all jumbled up with Featherstone's own and others, Hence the incorrect captioning of the original edition with corrections penciled in, and also some incorrect attribution in the Airfix guide by Bruce Quarrie on which Featherstone also contributed.

The picture above was reproduced from this original

Photography has come a long way since then!  This is the cousin to the 13th Light Dragoon pictured.  The 9th will get the same refresh to their paint and a good cleaning before too long, but there are so many units to bring back up into top notch condition!

And Now for Something Completely Different!

Below is a special Christmas present from my daughter to accompany last years gift of an anthology of the works of Robert E. Howard and his Conan stories.

A beautiful 40mm resin casting she found on Etsy, which will accompany my 40mm figures for a Dungeons and Dragoons type game called The Fantasy Trip.

.

Clearly modeled on the movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger!

A shot of his back showing his mighty thews!

As a parting shot I will link to the video just released by Schwarzenegger trying to digest and move past the events at the capital last week, featuring the Conan sword as a metaphor for American democracy - a sword must be tempered repeatedly to make it strong and resilient, and our democracy has certainly undergone a lot of that over the last four years.  I have faith we will emerge the stronger for it.

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck

54mm AWI Plastic Indians

 Here are some shots of Plastic American Indians based on some John Jenkins designs figures.  I got these from All the Kings Men, and though the poses are interesting, there was a lot of flash and undercuts that had to be trimmed away and the type of plastic used was particularly unforgiving.  The figures are also a tad bigger and a lot beefier than typical 54mm sculpts.  I think if I had to do it again I would consider the other brand of AWI Indians that they sell.  54mm is difficult enough to paint, and I must say I found the additional challenge of painting plastic figures quite difficult and am only moderately pleased with the result.  By the end, I was mostly just trying to get them finished and off my painting table.  They'll work well in a game, but no painting awards for these!

54mm DBN Barker Marker

 Here are some shots of a 54mm Barker Marker for DBN made from Tom Meier's excellent resin pieces from his Thunderbolt Mountain range of Napoleonic figures based on period caricatures.  The snow turned out to be problematic and I lost most of it during the shoot and had to apply with a different technique (gluing and then spraying to be sure it was firmly attached.)  These are on an 80x80mm base since I use non standard sized double basing for my 28mm DBN armies.

 

WIP - work in progress

Buildings for a 10mm DBACW army which is slowly taking shape.  Maybe I misread the rules, but it seems like you need 30 or so elements per side, which is a lot of painting when you are putting 7 10mm infantry figures on a base!

Couple of Barker markers for 15 and 25mm games

These are some plastic Indians that I picked up from All the King's Men a couple of years ago.  I'm painting up a dozen for their 54mm American Revolution game.  The indians are slowly coming together, but will make a nice addition to the regular British and Hessian infantry.

I'm still working on my WWII skills.  These are a tad too green I think, but for 30 hard plastic figures from Wargames Factory for $20 how could I say no.  Most of these figures are really quite good and the Russians are even better!

Yet another Barker Marker in progress.  This one was a tongue in cheek present from my daughter, but I must say I am having a blast with it!

Ken at All the King's Men was selling these at Nashcon, but since our gaming shop happens to be right next door to a cigar shop I decided to make my own.  It was a fair amount of work and given Ken's very reasonable prices I would recommend just buying them from him, but I was able to customize my box a bit which was nice.

And lastly I have a HotT army for Terry Webb's Good Bad and Ugly tournament coming up in November.  This year we have a Lord of the Rings theme, so this is meant to represent an Easterling army.  The Cavalry are Donnington Sarmations, the axemen and artillery are Khurasan Tang Chinese, and the wain rider and hordes are Testudo Celts.  Surprisingly they work well together.  I painted them with a limited palette to help the cohesive look of the army and am hopeful once the basing is done they will be an even more impressive looking army.

 

American War of Independence - Hessians

 These lovely fellows have been on my desk mocking me for at least a year and I am so pleased to have finally finished them.  They are 54mm AWI figure from "All the King's Men".  I got in some games this past weekend using the ATKM rules at Nashcon and had a blast.  The owner, Ken Cliffe, provided most of the figures and hosted an incredibly entertaining and stunningly gorgeous game.  Of course it helps that my side scored a decisive victory!

The flag for the Hessian Lieb regiment was copied directly from the internet and printed on linen paper.  The source was an 18th century period painting of the regiment; here a link:

 http://www.vondonop.org/uniformleib.html

 The officer, complete with crop with which to beat his subordinates into submission.  I chose to black line all of the fiddly detail with an ink liner which took some time.

Speaking of taking some time, what was I thinking when I decided to give these chaps blue ticked overalls.  I would stripe one or two pair a night, but that was all I could handle at one sitting.

ACW and AWI Distractions

I decided to get my desk cleared off and so have been taking care of some older projects before continuing with the Renaissance Venetians. First up are some Perry 25mm plastic Union Infantry. I was a bit disappointed at first with these, as they are a bit chunkier than I have come to expect from the Perrys, and the detail is not as crisp as I would like. With that said however, I thought they painted up quite well and more importantly, the final product has made me excited to try some more. Now I just need to find a good set of skirmish rules....

To facilitate a more uniform look for the federal troops I only chose figures with the sack coat (at least I think that is what these are called). This was my first foray into the ACW period so I was on a steep learning curve to try and get the uniforms correct. I did some custom cutting as well to maximize the number of troops I could get from the box in a firing line position, converting marching pose to holding a rifle horizontally like the figure above. The officer in the back is holding a pistol from the cavalry set.

A birds eye view of my first Federal company. I have another on the way with shouldered arms, but they will have to wait for the completion of the Venetians - unless I get impatient!

The firing line from Johnny Rebs point of view.

Next up the American War of Independence in 54mm.

I got sucked into the 54mm scale by a demo game at Nashcon by All the King's Men. Though I would like to have purchased their artillery, I ran out of funds, but found this Imex plastic set on sale at my local hobby shop for $8. They were marketed as Americans, but as the uniform was the same for both countries, I simply painted them as British. Above you can see a gunner stripped to his waist coat in the heat of working the guns. I replaced the plastic rammer with a metal rod which I inserted into the sponge and rammer of the plastic original.

Fortunately the Imex set came with the same proportion of 6 crew to one gun that is used in the All the King's Men rule set.

I thought the sculpts of the plastic figures was actually superior to the metal ones, though mold lines in this Imex set were not well placed, hence many a crewman with a mold line down the middle of his face. I have found plastic mold lines very difficult to shave or file well.

The commander. I did some work on the gun with green stuff to make it look more like a Brown Bess musket. It was originally sculpted with a long barrel without a supporting stock, which looked more like a long cavalry carbine. Maybe the sculptor knew AWI weapons better than I, but I could find nothing for the period that looked like it, so I changed it.

Here he is in all of his distinguished commanderly glory. The scabard of his sword was replaced with flattened floral wire which ended up working quite well.