Calendars from the past - Historical uniforms

Hi,

here are three scans of a collection of calenders that had been available in Germany in the sixties, seventies and eighties of the last century. 

I bought them on flea markets and on ebay several years ago and stored them on our attic for about 15 years because I couldn´t find a place to hang them.

And I´m still unable to find a good place.

Today I remembered of these calendars and also the old albums filled with the very popular uniform pictures they used to sell with cigarettes in former times.

These treasures sometimes hide very interesting pictures or paintings of special troops or ranks you sometimes can´t find in books or the net.

The calendars I´m talking about had been released by a publisher settled in Munich and Vienna.

The aquarelles had been painted by the artist Wolfgang Tritt (1913-1983) and are really beautiful.

The last picture could be very interesting for my friend Christopher (aka Axebreaker) showing an officer of Russian hussars of the SYW.

Cheers

Mike

Recycling a Christmas tree

On January 6th in Bavaria the Christmas season ends and almost every family throws its Christmas tree away. 

But we don´t do that like IKEA told us in a merchandising spot a few years ago.

We don´t celebrate "Knut". :)

We have a fireplace in our living room and so we always cut down the branches and put them into boxes to stir them up gradually.

This is the work I´m doing while my wife does the packaging of the decoration and the cleaning

(sorry, Karin).

Within the last few weeks my fever for French and Indian War inflamed again and I´m often thinking about possibilities to get nice terrain like woods or block houses.

Cutting down the tree today I recognized that if you strip off the fir needles from the branches the structure looks best for my tinker-project that I decided to keep some of those branches.

I won´t have to use skewers which need to be provided with a structure to look realistic and I even 

won´t have to paint them - the branches already have the most natural colour.

The structure of the branch on the right side is my favorite.

They can immediately be used as barricades on your wargaming table.

Okay, maybe some of you already had this idea but for those who didn´t just think about it.

Don´t celebrate "Knut", just recycle some parts of your old Christmas tree.

Bye

Mike

FIW - A size comparison of different figures

Manufacturers:  diverse

Scale:  28mm

Hi !

Yesterday I posted a picture of the first Pennsylvania Provincial for our FIW-project.

I don´t know how firm you are with the therefore used manufacturer "Galloping Major" and this was also the first figure from this company I´ve ever painted.

I like these figures very much for they are very fine casted, don´t need much cleaning and are great fun to paint.

But it is always good to know how the miniatures fit with ranges of other manufacturers.

So I just took a few photos to show a comparison of the figures of the period of FIW I already painted up for my collection.

There are also some other ranges within my collection like Northstar or ConquestMiniatures which are purchased by WarlordGames.

But I didn´t paint some of these figures yet and so you won´t find a comparison here.

As soon as I did this I will also post some comparison pictures as reference.

There is also another good manufacturer called "Redoubt Enterprises" who also has a FIW-range.

I don´t have Redoubt in my collection yet but I think that they would fit very good with Galloping Major.

The first picture shows a comparison with the newer British SYW-range from WargamesFoundry.

I painted these figures about 3 or 4 years ago and to be honest, I didn´t want to use them for gaming as they are a little too big and the faces are a little bit comic style (could also be because of my painting).

They didn´t really fit with other manufacturers.

But compared with the figure of Galloping Major they do fit very well in my opinion.

Not concerning the faces but the height and scale.

I bought some of these figures on ebay a few years ago and now am very happy that I found a good use for them.

So the British forces for FIW are already on stock by now. :)

GallopingMajor compared with British SYW-range of WargamesFoundry.
The French SYW-range of WargamesFoundry has a similar size and style.

Though the next figures from WargamesFoundry aren´t FIW but SYW I think that a comparison to GallopingMajor might be useful.

These Prussians are from the former ranges of WargamesFoundry and are smaller than the British SYW-range shown on the first picture.

As you can see the miniature of Galloping Major is sized between both ranges.

GallopingMajor compared to a WargamesFoundry Prussian of the SYW.

Another comparison to WargamesFoundry SYW Prussian Grenadiers.

Next there is a comparison to AWI-figures from WargamesFoundry which are similar in size to Perry ranges.

Crusader also fits very well to GallopingMajor.

The last photo shows the differences to the beautiful and my beloved SYW-range of FrontRank. 

I wouldn´t mix the different ranges within one unit or base but certainly both ranges could exist on the same wargaming table in different regiments. 

Cheers
Mike
:)