Prisoners

I'm afraid real life has taken over of late, so please excuse the blog silence.  This vignette consists of plastic figures from the Perry Miniatures Continental and British infantry boxes.  I remember seeing some early photos on the Perry website of figures from the Continental Infantry set before it was released which had an unarmed walking figure.  I thought then that a vignette of American prisoners would be worth doing, and here it is.  I will post some thoughts on the plastic Continental infantry box set in due course (I'm currently working on the 10th Massachusetts using these figures), so this is more in the way of a taster.  The marching American figures are possible because the Continental set has separate arms and the various options allow you to create figures that aren't carrying anything.

I wanted to create a generic scene that could be used for northern and southern battles.  The American with the blue coat has buff facings because I thought there was enough red in the vignette already.  The British soldier has been painted as being from the 5th Foot - not for any special reason, but I wanted a regiment that had a different colour in its facings to buff, blue or red, and the 5th got around a bit during the war.  I had originally intended to add some more "battlefield debris" to the scene, but after playing around a bit I decided that less is more and settled for just one loose hat.  Originally I was going to have a discarded pistol or musket lying in front of the figures, so that the American chap on the left was suggesting that they make a dash to pick it up.  But I couldn't really make that work from a compositional perspective.  Nonetheless, I'm quite pleased with the way this has turned out, although I'm not really sure how often it will appear on the table.

I have a couple of longer posts in the drafting stage, specifically two militia units and my 71st Foot firing line (this vignette is posted out of painting sequence - I only finished it this morning).  As I may have mentioned before, I intend to re-organise the existing post on the 71st  to give each battalion its own post and then a third for my new unit.  I'm hoping to do all that this week (I'm theoretically on holiday now, although I'm likely to be called into work for at least one or two days...)