New dio Kingdom of Holland part 1

 

Recently I bought a lot of Historex spare parts from a fellow-modeller. Good for me, because I'm interested in two parts of Dutch military history: The Batavian republic ( 1795-1806) and the Kingdom of Holland( 1806 - 1810). I also bought a figure of a trooper of the Light Dragoons from the Batavian period of time.

Now, you can make several individual pieces of work, but this time I wanted to combine three soldiers of the same period of time together.

This is the idea:

A dragoon of the 1st regiment  of the heavy cavalry on horseback talking to a  cuirassier of the 2nd regiment. The sitting figure will be a trumpeter  of the 2nd regiment of cuirassiers.

On the picture a test setup to see how it will work out. At first I created the underground. In that way I could test fit the basic figures.

The base of the diorama

 

I use a suitable piece of plywood. terrain is made of self-hardening clay and polymer filler for walls. I sprinkle  ground catlitter into the wet surface.

After drying everything was painted in dark brown acrylics.

This is my collection of powder pastels

I covered parts of the underground with static grass and tuffs of grass fron scenery workshop

The wooden underground is covered with yellow masking tape. Only at the last stage of creating the dio I will remove the  tape and paint the plywood.

Stage two: making the dragoon and horse

The horse is made of Historex parts. I didn't have the downwards bent neck, so I did some plastic surgery. Gaps were filled with  Magic Sculpt.

It took quite a time to make the neck right. After sanding and using  Magic Sculpt again I used Green Stuff to remove the small gaps that were left behind.

I then added a sadle and blanket and all the stuff a horse used to carry.

After I was satisfied with the conversion I painted the horse  brown with Humbrol paint

Then I let it dry for 24 hours.

The horse was then painted in a very dark brown oil colour: Windsor and Newton sepia.

Most of the paint is removed then with a large brush, leaving a thin layer of oil paint over the lighter  Humbrol brown. That way you get the dark brown sheen of a life-like horse.

Be sure to wipe off almost all the brown paint. I repeated this process several times. Make sure the previous layer is entirely dry before you apply paint again.

Saddle and cloth are painted in Valejo acrylics. I use Citadel contrast paint to give depth to the base-colour .

The trooper is made of Historex parts and painted in Vallejo acrylics. Again finished with Citadel contrast paints