1837 Rebellion in Lower Canada - Part I B: Royal Montreal Artillery

The Royal Montreal Artillery, c. 1837

Fellow gamer Doug H. encouraged me to paint up some proper British artillery for the campaign rather than 'sub in' the poor Prussians.

The Royal Montreal Artillery is a pretty obscure volunteer unit, and I can only find one or two references to it -- but that just means that one can take as many liberties with it as one likes. 

The below are based on the comtemporary Madras artillery. Thanks Doug!

This gun crew looks on askance as their battery commander
steps forth to damn the Rebels, good and proper.

1837 Rebellion in Lower Canada - Part II: Les Patriotes

This section covers my newly completed Patriotes army; or the 'Rebels', or 'Les Habitants', or whatever you prefer. For those who are not familiar with the 1837 Canadian Rebellions, I guess they can best be summarized in wargaming terms as 'the Alamo meets Les Miserables'.  

One of the goals behind putting this mini-collection together was to help reduce my mountain of lead, but as is often the case I actually had to buy some new figures, since I had nothing suitable on hand for Les Patriotes. In the event I ordered Blue Moon Texians from Old Glory, waited three months for them so show up, and set about converting them.

Fellow gamer Doug H. provided some helpful advice here for making the proper touque headgear. "Cut the top half off the heads of most of them, plop on a blob of Green Stuff, pull it up in a point, and flop it over to one side. Piece of cake."

So I went about doing just that, along with applying a primer coat to get going and ... they looked exactly like a gang of Garden Gnomes! Like, The First Regiment of Gnomish Foot (Noddy's Own), complete with 'Big Ears' as Colonel-in-Chief! 

Normally things like this can be corrected as you start painting, but as I added coats, trousers, headgear, etc., it just kept on getting worse and worse. Night after night I sat at the painting table crying 'Make it stop! Just make it stop!'  When I got to the muskets things got a bit better. Now they looked like really serious garden gnomes. 

After doing some additional research I discovered that I wasn't really that far off; the touques of the day could be quite voluminous articles, and flowed all over the place. A final staining toned done the colours some and drew the figures together, and so I ended up not altogether unhappy with 'Noddy's Own'.