Saturday, April 12, 2008

Markers, Counters & Conversions

A comment by Rafa made me think about how I have used my Prince August moulds and the extra bits that have collected from the castings I have done.

One thing I did was use the shakos, muskets, gun carriage wheels, cut off packs and drums of castings that were otherwise unusable.

These 'bits' were then assembled on fender washers and turned into 'markers'.

I selected a trio of samples from the two dozen or so that I have currently to show you what I mean.

I have also found that I can cast an extra horse for each force of cavalry that I do and use the extra horse as a 'blown' or 'disorder' marker specifically for that cavalry unit and there is little or no confusion about which unit has the 'marker' since it matches the unit. I paint the markers at the same time as the unit so the shabraques all match.

These same horses also work well with minifigs riders, like this one that I got in an eBay collection of minis while I was building up my Russian Horse.

Further advantage to the self-casting method is a willingness to attack the minis in the process of conversion...something that is less likely with a higher priced, though probably better sculpted mini.

And just because I wanted to show them all off, including the minifig in comparison to the others, here is a group shot.

1 comment:

rpardo said...

Hi
A great idea to use the gun's wreckage. And yes, some of the Napoleon's Battles markers are broken wheels
Regards
Rafa