28mm - Napoleonic Portuguese - 9th Cazadores Battalion

 

The latest work from my painting table. This is the 9th Cazadore Battalion, one of the very fine Portuguese light infantry battalions raised during the Napoleonic Wars.

The figures are from the wonderful Perry Miniatures range.  I did wonder how best to base these; skirmish order, or in line or in threes, so I can send some out to skirmish?  In the end I opted to base the musket armed men in Line but for the rifle armed company, the Atiradores to be in skirmish order.

I'm not too fond of having too many figures on small bases. I find that muskets and bayonets get damaged too easily, especially when forming close order again.  If I really needed to deploy the main musket companies in skirmish order I can always space the stands out and declare them to be skirmishing.

I opted for the 9th Battalion. The main reasons for this being that they were in a lot of the actions of the Peninsular wars (as were the other Battalions), and also I just liked the combination of black cuffs and red collars lined with black.  It was fun to paint.

Despite fairly sombre brown uniforms made from local wool, there is enough detail and colour to make them interesting.  I like to add a few different trouser shades to reflect the hardships of campaigning.  The white summer uniform trousers being worn in some instances and browns and greys among the remainder.  

The brown lent itself well to lightening with dusty shades on knees and elbows, in a measured way. Enough to suggest these are men professionally happy to use cover and get down and dirty when they need to.

I think one of the most difficult things about them was deciding whether they are called Cacadores or Casadores!  Different books have different spellings.  I lean towards the latter as it appears that this is how it is pronounced. I think the 'c' in Cacadores misses the accent in English script, hence the confusion (but I know little of languages).

The poses on the Baker rifle armed Atiradores are very much to my liking.  To my mind these really suited being on Skirmish bases.

As I'll be using different rule sets, I wanted a commander on  a single stand just to be able to use for 'Sharp Practice' skirmish rules.  These characters come in very handy and indeed, in last night's game (the first we have played of 28mm Napoleonics despite many many years of dabbling in the period in this scale!), this particular battalion gained glory by taking key ground in the centre of the field.  The Sergeant controlled his men wonderfully!  It has to be said Sharp Practice is a great set of rules to play without the need to paint hundreds of figures. It actually made having fun with them attainable without a further 15 years of painting before I can begin to play with them!

So what's next?  I'm in that position of not having made my mind up. I'm currently gathering source materials to see what I feel like doing...I think it will still be Napoleonics though!