A Quick & Very Red Liberators Update.

I've had, by my own slow standards a productive week so far and as a consequence have pushed the Liberators project a little further along.
I now have two stands of the Patriot Santander Regiment completed and based:

A third & fourth base are currently having their trousers re fashioned in green stuff prior to painting.

In addition a couple more Husares de Concordia have been completed. I've tried a couple of different treatments on their horses because I feel some of my earlier efforts in this department have been a little too similar. From left to right: a dark chestnut, bay & lighter chestnut.

Hopefully the remainder of the week will see continued progress as I fear a busy weekend may intrude somewhat on painting time. More of this later.

Husare de Concordia.

Finally got back to doing some "proper painting" today following a short period of distraction. After repeatedly telling myself and others that I didn't want to include any more cavalry in either of my Liberators armies I cracked yesterday because of the weather. Now this sounds like a very lame excuse but bear with me. I was working near Wellington, Shropshire yesterday when the most god awful rain & sleet started, now being a sensible sort I decided to suspend operations temporarily so as not to have the discomfort of working in wet clothes for the rest of the day. So far, so irrelevent except that Wellington is the home to Questing Knight Games, purveyors of fine quality wargaming paraphenalia and just the place for a sensible chap to spend a rainy interlude and have a chat with Alan the owner. Unfortunately the short visit culminated in money being mysteriously drawn from my pocket and a box of Perry French Hussars replacing it. The moral of the story: never go into shops with cash in your pocket.
Anyway now that I've bought them its only right that they should be graced with some paint, the result so far being a Royalist Husare de Concordia Bugler:

Now I'm sure some of the uniform details aren't quite 100% but at just over a quid a figure close enough I hope.
There will be another five of these Colorados to come which accounts for six of the figures out of the box, its uncertain as to who the other eight will be asked to impersonate but I'm sure something will crop up.

Simon Bolivar's Guard of Honour.

It's been a fairly quiet fortnight on the gaming & creative front following the big push for the WAB  Sellasia game that Mr. Ireland and I played back in January. Its difficult sometimes to summon the energy to model and paint after a day working outside in what have of late been fairly wet & dirty conditions. Much easier to sit by the fire with a glass of scotch and read instead. It was this burst of reading activity which has led to this post. Re-visiting the Osprey title on Bolivar and San Martin jogged my memory concerning an article in Military Modelling which I knew was buried somewhere in one of my boxes up in the attic, so today an expedition was launched to recover said tome pictured below:

This article pre-dates the Osprey title by four years and fills in some of the detail on Bolivars Honour Guards understandably missing from the Osprey given the limited amount of space available on 48 pages. There are one or two differences in the illustration of the Red Hussar compared to his later incarnation but then some of the details are speculative anyway.
Anyway reading through the article has given me a bit of impetus to get on with the Liberators project which has been running out of steam lately and hopefully it may prove of general use and interest.