The Red Regiment - London Trained Bands

Another one done!  The final musket wing now completes this unit. It's all fully manned, and newly based and ready for action.

This regiment presented somewhat of a dilemma as to whether to represent the buff coats which Trained Bands troops are often portrayed.  The jackets on these musketeers are really too short to paint buff in the hope that I could get away with representing sleeveless buff coats.  In the end I settled with some pikemen in sleeveless buff coats but musketeers without.  Another dilemma was whether to have the trained bandsmen in civilian jackets or red ones - different modern authors seem split on this one.  I decided to go for an issue of uniform coloured jackets, but kept personal touches of different coloured ribbon ties on breeches to show some independent spirit on the part of the regiment's volunteer members.  The 'Red' of Red Regiment relates only to the colours carried, the same as the 'Blew Regiment' carried blue ones. (This regiment will follow at a later date!).

I can't claim credit this time for painting the whole regiment.  My wargaming friend Ian painted much of this unit several years ago.  I rescued it from joining a Bring and Buy stand at a show and have since re-based them all.  The musketeers shown below are the ones I have been painting in the last few weeks to bring the unit up to strength.  Buying a nicely painted unit can be a double-edged sword of course if you wish to add more figures, as you have to try to colour match (within reason) and not make your own figures too different in style.

The figures are again the superb Bicorne figures from their English Civil War range and are an absolute joy to paint.

Here are a couple of close-ups:

Well, that's the figure progress of the last few weeks.

I'm going to go off at a slight tangent here and mention that I found an unforeseen problem as I sat down to playtest my new Pike and Shotte rules with these large units of mine...the board is too darned small!  My board is 8ft x 4ft.  This always seemed massive when rules always allowed movement of between 3" to 6"...but these days rules allow lots of big movements it seems (and no bad thing either, nothing worse than an action that took an hour in real time taking 2 days to play!).  I could scale movements down of course but even the starting positions just look too close.  No room for manoeuvre just a head on clash!

So....I'm designing a take-down table which can break into sections and go behind the sofa when I'm not playing.  When assembled it is 12ft x 6ft...much more satisfactory!  I'm divided between buying teddy bear fur and making a super home-made terrain set (and risk making a mess of it!) or whether to buy something ready made from someone like this: http://terrainmat.com/
Has anyone any experience of this firm or similar?  Your advice would be much appreciated.:-)