Prussian Army -- Grand Review

I've been working on my 15mm Prussian army since about last January. I'm officially calling it complete, though no army is ever quite finished. I have painted everything I have, minus the usual leftover officers, flag bearers and drummers. At some point, I'll probably assemble those into 3 or 4-figure command stands to use to boost the size of my army if necessary (subtract one regular stand from four units and replace it with a command stand and you buy yourself another full unit).

The pictures that follow are meant to show a couple of things. No. 1, even an average paint job that skips some of the detail still looks pretty good enmasse, and No. 2, if you are interested in Old Glory or Battle Honors figures, you can get a decent idea of what the poses look like and how they look painted. Here's the grand review of my army -- in pictures of course.

Here's the full army held in three Sterilite 12x12 drawers.



Shots of various Prussian line (Old Glory) units, march attack:









Here's a unit of Battle Honors Prussian line, march attack pose. The BH figures are a little thinner and the equipment a little more in scale, but it's more fragile as a result, so expect some broken bayonets.



Prussian artillery (Old Glory). I painted the guns the wrong blue. They should be more of a sky blue color. I figure at some point paint was in short supply and they made do with what they had, so consider this battery to have improvised.



Here's my C-in-C figure with a couple of aides, plus a shot of one of the mounted officers. The mounted command figures are all Old Glory and are all very well done.





Here's all the line units on the parade ground. My units are 16 figures plus I try to paint an officer, drummer or flag bearer to go with it. I use these single figures to denote command status -- if the single figure is in front, it is in command. If it is behind the unit, it is out of command.



No Prussian army would be complete without some Landwehr. The first is Landwehr in shako, and the second is Landwehr with the British supplied uniforms.





Silesian Landwehr:



More Landwehr:




When a stand is removed in my games, I replace it with a dead soldier (infantry) or dead horse (cavalry). What can I say, I like realistic looking battlefields. All these figures are Battle Honors.








Here are the jaegers, or light infantry. I base them four to a stand with a slightly broader frontage than the line units. I don't like "skirmish" bases, because jaegers often fought in close ranks like regular infantry. I just position them erratically on the base. When skirmishing, the bases are spread out and you see clumps of four figures skirmishing, while when in close ranks, they are dense enough to look the part.





On to the cavalry. Here we see landwehr lancers in the British shako, then landwehr lancers in the soft cap:





Here are some dragoons. I painted them a mid-blue. There's a lot of disagreement about what shade blue they were. Some say dark, some say mid, some say light. I have a couple of units in Prussian blue and the rest are like these. Again, I figure there probably wasn't a lot of uniformity because of supply shortages, so I took some license to vary mine.



Here are my hussars. The black ones are the Death's Head Hussars. Hussars are where my average painting skills really fall short. There's just too much detail for me to deal with, so I go for a sort of impressionistic approach. From a distance, they look pretty good. Just don't look too close...







Here are my line lancers (yes, there are a lot of sharpened stick carriers in this army...)





Here's my horse artillery battery. They are hard to distinguish from the regular artillery, so for quick identification, I painted their guns brass and the field artillery barrels black.



All cavalry figures are Old Glory. We have now reached the end of our grand review. I have already started working on the French and will post results when they are complete. I hope you have enjoyed the show.



Final thoughts: This was my first foray into 15mm metal figures. I was very pleased with the sculpts of Old Glory and Battle Honors. Most everything was in proportion, with the exception of the bayonets being a bit big. But the BH bayonets were more in scale and were very fragile, so I can see why they would oversize those a bit. When placed in mass, they look pretty good regardless.
If anyone has any questions, I will be glad to answer them. Please note that any flags you see probably aren't accurate for the unit. I tend to just download flags from warflag.com and just go with whatever looks good to me. If you are interested in buying your own figures, you can buy them directly from Old Glory at www.oldglory15s.com