It's quiet...too quiet

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last week or so. Real life has intervened, but in a good way! I've been busy going to interviews and selection days and have now had a job offer.

Massive relief all round!

All this means for the project is that blog posts might be more infrequent. I'm pushing on with the figures and we hope to start the sculpting at the beginning of May.

Research

Lord, it’s hard work researching the uniforms and equipment for these figures. You’d think one picture would do, but really you need every possible angle covered if the sculptor is going to have a chance of producing an accurate figure.

You’d think, having picked the army of my own country, from less than 125 years ago that it would be easy wouldn’t you? I can assure you it’s not! My sympathy lies with anyone trying to produce figures for the 1750 Dagestani Civil War or other such obscure (or in the case of the Dagestani Civil War, made up) conflict.

During my online research I was fortunate enough to come across the website of the Diehards Reinactment group (please see my links for their website). The website is great, full of fantastic photographs and information. Hoping that I might get a little more useful information I emailed Tim Rose, one of the contacts given on the site. Tim has been fantastic, answering my questions about uniforms, tactics and unit composition with a great deal of patience.

I’m hoping to meet up with the Diehards when they visit Osbourne House on the Island in May. I’m also hoping to convince them to pose for photos which I will then base the figures on!

What's in a name?

The perceptive reader will have noticed in my first post the name I’ve chosen for this venture – Le Queux Miniatures.

I’ve thought long and hard about the name. It has to be unique. It has to reflect what I want to sell. My initial idea was “England Invaded”, but there is already a line of miniatures available from Warrior with this name (worth a look).

Le Queux, for those of you unfamiliar with late Victorian literature, was the author of 150 novels, with one, “The Invasion of 1910” selling over 1 million copies! His work is not going to win the Booker prize, but they are a fun read and full of scenarios for wargamers. Best of all you can get many of them free (my favourite word!) as Kindle downloads on Amazon or the Project Gutenberg website.

You can find out more about William Le Queux on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Le_Queux

The Bombardment of London - from "The Great War in England 1897" by William Le Queux

First Post. The adventure begins...

 

I’ve set this blog up to record my efforts to start my own range of 28mm miniatures – British Army of the 1880’s in Home Service Uniform.

This should be an adventure. I’ve never blogged before. I’ve never started a range of miniatures before.

What am I doing?

Ok, to give you some background (as it seems like the right thing to do at this point); I was made redundant at the beginning of April.

 “Restructuring”

Nice.

Only remotely good thing about this is that having been at the Company for several years I had a decent pay out; enough money to pay the bills while I found another job, but more importantly (as far as this blog is concerned anyway) that I had enough to fund this experiment.

Well, so far I’ve emailed several sculptors all of whom have been incredibly helpful. Although some were too busy to undertake the work, I’m really, genuinely excited about the sculptor I’ve got on board.

No, I’m not going to name him yet, not until the work is underway. My money doesn’t come through until the end of the month so nothing will start until then anyway.

Anyway, first hurdle passed – sculptor in place.

Next in line is organising the mouldmaker and caster. Doesn’t seem to be an issue here, everyone I have spoken to has pointed me in the direction of Griffin www.griffinmoulds.com .  Got some prices which are about what I expected. Hurdle two crossed.

So, what exactly do I want? I have some ideas, but my ideas outstrip my wallet (seems to be an occupational hazard for a wargamer).  For me the problem with the existing ranges is that they are a bit limited. I’d like to cover units such as Fusiliers and Riflemen as well as the ubiquitous Line Infantry and Guardsmen. The question is how to do this on a limited budget?

The answer I’ve come up with is separate heads.

Think 7TV figures from Crooked Dice.

My master plan is to produce the body in various poses and then produce many different head variants, allowing me to field loads of different units, but with reduced production costs.

I think it’s genius. I don’t know what other gamers will make of it though, so if anyone does actually read this (thank you for that) I really would love to hear your views.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on a little too much so, again, if anyone has actually read this – thank you!