Friday Potpourri - Rearranging the Furniture

Der Alter Fritz at the Berliner Zinnfiguren store in Berlin

I have managed to keep myself busy during the first couple of weeks of retirement, and I sort of wonder where does the day go each day. I guess that this is a good thing. One thing that I am trying to get a grip on is a return to the painting table - haven't done anything since June 2016. To that end, I have tackled a group of old Britain's Egyptian lancers for the Sudan Wars. They are fairly beat up or already had bad repaint work done on them, so I did not figure that I was losing any value by repainting them myself.

Here is the Before picture with one of the new repaints that I did the other day.

The partial After picture of some of the Egyptians. Ride like an Egyptian, eh?

I currently have 20 of the lancers and about half of them look to have their original paint so I might leave these fellahs alone. The other half are going to undergo the brush, ASAP.

I have never worked with glossy enamel paint before, so this is a learning experience for me. I immediately discovered one benefit of acrylics over enamels - if you are a brush licker then you have to change some of your habits whilst using enamels. One time pretty much cured me of the habit.

Enamels don't dry very fast, so there is only so much brushwork that you can do on a model in one sitting. Heck, even a day later, some of the figures are still a little bit tacky. However, they are nice and shiny and glossy and look great, from a toy soldier point of view.

The best part of this exercise is that it may have broken up the loss of painters' mojo. I don't want to get too cocky, but it looks like Sir Brushalot is back.


I also did a little bit of bookshelf rearranging, moving a long line of ACW books from the Library to some open shelving in the Living Room, here at Mallard Hall. The new space enabled me to display more of my Toy Soldier collection.

My own version of the Zinnfiguren store.

The right side of the book shelves: one can never have too many Highlanders, or too many Napoleons.

The left side of the book shelves features some British heroes.

Battle of the Bands (Black Watch on the left, Seaforths on the right)

A close up of some of the toy soldiers.

I have one more Sudan game coming up in November and after that I will remove the desert terrain from my game table and lay out the Battle of Leuthen, in time for its anniversary on December 5th.