NWF: a generous gift

As regular readers will know I am lucky enough to be part of a regular group that take part in games hosted by Eric the Shed (Shed Wars blog).  During a conversation one evening recently with Eric I mentioned my 54mm North West Frontier project and how it was coming along.  He told me that his late father had some painted some figures and formed these into dioramas and very kindly offered them to me.  He warned me that the painting quality might not be great but they may be usable with some touching up.

A week or so later I picked up a 4 dioramas of infantry and cavalry and a very impressive mounted artillery piece.  All the infantry and cavalry are actually from the same Armies In Plastic range that I've been using for my armies so they'll fit in perfectly.  The cavalry are the British 19th Hussars set and  a unit of Indian Cavalry along with 27 regular infantry.  Although I couldn't see a limbered artillery set on the AiP website I'm pretty sure all the figures and gun pieces are from one of their sets.

 To be honest the painting was pretty good...I've certainly produced much worse... and I don't think the figures will need much more that washing and highlighting in most cases.  Because these are soft plastic there are some parts where the paint has flaked off: this is especially noticeable on the Indians (in the photo you can see the yellow plastic showing through on the sword).

So far I have removed the cavalry and the artillery from their diorama bases.  This was a harder job than it sounds as Eric's father had used what I'm guessing is Milliput or something similar to mount the figures and it was really tough to break off.  I tried soaking the cavalry overnight which helped a bit but actually it was easier when the surface was dry and brittle.  With a bit of twisting and chiselling with a screwdriver (and a few near misses with my fingers) the figures are now free.  I've still to attempt to remove the infantry yet though...they're a pretty substantial block of basing which might take a while.

Once these are free I'll start work on touching up the figures and rebasing and hope I can do credit to Eric Seniors modelling skills.  A very generous gift indeed!  Of course now I have lots of British so my Pathans are a bit outnumbered and I'll have to buy some more!!!