Inniskilling Dragoons

My painting productivity over the last few weeks has hardly been tremendous but I am a bit behind on posting so here are the latest offerings. They are two troopers of the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons both vintage castings of BN40 British Dragoon Trotting in Helmet. My cavalry squadrons are made up of 6 figures but I don’t have quite enough of these castings to make a full one so they will be amalgamated with a troop of Household cavalry to form a combined squadron. This gives me the chance to paint these two splendid figures types that otherwise I would have had to leave out of the army. This figure is quite a primitive sculpt compared with latter offerings from Hinton Hunt and interestingly they had been painted before not once but twice – as I stripped the old paint (they were painted as French Dragoons if you remember) I discovered a layer of red paint beneath. In both previous incarnations however the flash had been left on and painted over and each figure took over half an hour of preparation with a variety of files before I could undercoat them. If they look a bit glossy in the picture it’s because they are! I have just started a new pot of Humbrol Satin-Cote and rather annoyingly it hasn’t dried as it should. Years ago of course I used gloss varnish and I suppose for this retro project that might have been the better choice. They’ll probably dull down a bit over time.