Winter Arrives at Hesse Seewald

Winter has hit the Duchy  of Hesse Seewald with a vengeance, having dumped 18 inches of snow over the past several days, with 4-6 more inches supposed to hit us over night. This will be followed by an Arctic blast of cold air that will see subzero temperature arriving Sunday evening and staying with us for 48  -- that's two full days with high temperatures below zero. We will hit minus 18F on Monday morning and the high temperature for the day will be a balmy minus 10F.

I'm afraid that we are doomed.

So what is one to do to help make the Winter Blues go away? Why head to the basement and start painting Minden and Fife & Drum figures, of course. I find that the Winter months are some of my most productive ones when it comes to churning out the painted figures. At one time, I could knock out 120 28/30mm figures in a month, but now I have cut that figure in half to about 60 figures painted per month. That still represents two full 30-figure infantry or cavalry regiments in my Minden 1:20 ratio SYW armies.

Winter is a good time to plan out the projects and painting schedule for the coming year. The last two years were necessarily focused on painting American Revolution figures so that I could have two armies for my convention games. Nothing promotes a figure range more than seeing them painted and on the tabletop. Now that the Minden range is a part of Fife & Drum, I will want to beef up my Austrian and Prussian armies so that I can run convention games at the Seven Years War Association convention in March and at Historicon in July.

To that end, I need to add two more battalions of Austrian infantry and a dragoon regiment to complete my core Austrian army for the convention circuit. I would also like to add a hussar regiment to my Austrian forces.

My Prussian army is in fairly good shape with respect to the core force of 12 infantry battalions and 4 cavalry regiments. I would like to add a second cuirassier regiment as well as the Garde du Corps regiment. I have enough infantry, so perhaps a Garrison regiment or a Frei Battalion would be useful additions.

Once the first of the AWI dragoons go into production, I will probably switch over to painting a lot of these as several Kickstarter backers opted for the painted dragoons reward level. I am now waiting on our caster to make the production molds and spin the lead so that we have inventory to ship to our backers. Hopefully, we can start shipping by the end of this month or in early February . It all depends on the casters backlog of projects and my place in the queue.