Rectangles Win! See the Results

 

Morgan's Rifles
Fife and Drum Miniatures

After weighing the pros and cons of the circle versus rectangle basing scheme for my AWI American riflemen, I settled on using rectangular bases. The bases used are 60mm by 80mm. My original plan was to put five figures on the base with the longer 80mm frontage and 60mm depth. However, this did not provide what I deemed to be needed depth of the base, so I simply flipped the base around 90-degrees so that the frontage is the 60mm side and the depth is now 80mm.

This solution provides enough room to space out the deployment of the individual figures to give them a more "open order" appearance. The added depth enables me to place the figures on three different tiers within the base.

The added depth enabled me to make little dioramas on each stand, adding some rocks here and some cut up trees there. The stand was finished off with plenty of tufts and static grass. It is important to use the smallest rocks and twigs that you can find to decorate the stands, otherwise they will look out of proportion to the size of the 1/56 scale figures (~30mm).

Ground level view of the American riflemen.

The figures were glued to the stands in a sort of random and informal manner so as to convey the idea that these are skirmish/open order troop rather than formed troops. Since the riflemen do not have bayonets, they had best stay away from formed British soldiers with leveled bayonets. I also placed some of the firing figures aiming off to the side or front corner of the stand to avoid the appearance of any kind of formation.

I couldn't place all six stands in a single row within my photographic light box,
so  two of the stands are placed behind the front four stands.

Close up view of Morgan's Rifles.

Next up on the painting table: von Barner's light infantry in Brunswick service. After that I will probably start working on Dearborn's light infantry battalion, the musket-armed chosen men whose job was to provide support to the rifle-armed soldiers who lacked bayonets.