Dipping a Toe in the Water. South American Wars of Liberation.

Finally took the plunge on what for me is a totally new era of wargaming, the South American Wars of Liberation c.1810-1824. After a couple of weeks of reading & googling I felt confident enough to go out and purchase the first figures for the period. After a certain amount of umming & arring I purchased two boxes of Victrix Napoleonics, one each of French and Austrian infantry. A combination of covered French shakos on Austrian bodies with trousers modified with green stuff gives a fairly close approximation of the Venezuelan/ Gran Colombian infantry that I want for phase one of the project.

The genesis of these are shown above, initially the plan is to base the units for Regimental Fire & Fury with four fusilier bases, one grenadier base & one light infantry ( cazadores) base all of four figures and just keep going until I run out of suitable bits. At that point, given that I'll have a heap of French uniformed bodies and Austrian shakos I will assemble those as a proxy for Spanish Royalist troops. Hopefully they won't be too far off the mark, looking through some Knotel prints it seems as if some Spanish uniforms of the period followed a 'French' style.
Right, off to get some paint on these fellows- wish me luck.