Normal service resumed

I'm afraid that I've had a serious loss of wargaming "mojo" of late, hence the silence here since January. I'm sorry about that. In addition to this blog I have found myself staying away from many other blogs and fora which I regularly visit, so apologies to all those who have made interesting posts over the past few weeks which I have failed to notice and comment upon. There is no "story" behind this, just too little time and too many demands on that time. Anyway, I have been painting in the meantime and, more importantly, had a day of work last week that co-incided with a rare appearance of the sun in Essex so enabling me to take photos of everything I've painted since last December. I now have enough material for 6 painting posts and a couple on other military things, and other units are close to being finished. So I'll be able to make weekly posts for the forseeable future. I've been making an effort recently to finish off items that have been sitting on my painting table in various stages of completeness. These items include ECW command stands, more Darkest Africa Baluchis/Arabs and my first completed ACW Confederate units. Nothing to do with the AWI, I know, but I'll post photos anyway.

Talking about the AWI, I'm afraid everything I've been working on recently is for my First Carlist War and 1815 projects. I want to finish off some larger FCW regiments this month, but in April I'm very much intending to revisit the AWI and work on more American cavalry and French. But to be honest, given the size of my AWI collection (I must add it all up one day), there is not much impetus to add to the American and British collections (cavalry aside - I still have some obvious gaps on that front), at least until Perry Miniatures release their plastic sets, at which point I expect I will jump back into the period for a good while.

Above are a couple of wip shots - on the left are Navarre Guides for the FCW and on the right are the beginnings of the French 54th Line at Waterloo. The former I am progressing at the moment; the latter was begun as they were the only undercoated figures I had when I'd finished something else! I'm not sure when I will get around to finishing the battalion. On the ACW front, I have two Reb regiments finished and another pair in variouos stages of completeness. These are mainly figures I painted about 12 years and simply failed to base, so they are painted in a style that is quite different to the one I use today (and the figures are Dixon so I know a lot of readers won't like them!). I've been adding some more figures over the past 12 months and what I'm intending to do is wait until the other 2 units, and a couple of vignettes, are finished and then have an "ACW week" along the lines of the "New Zealand Wars week" of last year. I'm aware that I need to return to the South American Wars of Liberation at some stage too, and paint more ECW because Eclaireur wants to have some games with all the figures he's painted!