La Belle Alliance Part 6, (and Final Part).

Hello There! I have finished the La Belle Alliance model. I can now go through the last steps of building. The last previous part of this tutorial is here.

As you can see I have added the moss to the main roof. When this had all dried I then did a very light airbrush of mid brown and the left to varnish next.

I added a watered done brown to the sign and allowed to dry.

The boards at the end of the building were cut from thin plastic card, painted in white enamel and painted the same way as the window frames, door frames and doors.

The sign on the end of the building was covered in a combination of AK Slimy Dark Green and AK Slimy Light Green enamel colour. I washed these with white spirit to get a thinner finish. 

Here is a clearer view of the moss on the main roof.

Overall this work was a practice to find out what the problems were, with such a build. I picked up a few tips to avoid some problems when making further buildings in the future.

Battle of Arcola, 15th to 17th November, 1789

Hello there! Here is a game that was put on at the New Buckenham Historical Wargames Club.

This was part of a series of linked games from the Revolutionary Wars. Due to shortage of figures we used figures in later uniforms for this game.

The curve of the river and the marshy area can easily be seen and this allowed Napoleon to use internal lines of communication.

One bridge was taken by the French attacking forces.

Here is a nice little vineyard, which I will 'poach' for the Mediterranean scenery that I am making at the moment.

This wagon was particularly eye catching as I am also working on a convoy and supplies scenario for a horse & musket period game.

There are further pictures here. on the club facebook page. I took a small part in the game and it was particularly well run and very enjoyable. 

Battle of Caldiero 1796

Hello There! Recently the New Buckenham Historical Wargamers put on an early Napoleonic wargame along the lines of the Battle of Caldiero, 1795.

Here is an overall view of the battlefield. It was fought using 28mm figures and used figures from a few collections from various club members. The rules used were Shako 2 with some club modifications. Prussian figures stood in for the Austrians.

As you can see the quality of figure painting was high.

The French came on to take the settlements in front of the ridge which the Russian forces occupied.

Here is one of the attacks on a village.

And another view of the same attack.

The Russian figures used reflected the later 1812 uniforms as we do not have figures available for the earlier period. 

Here French chasseurs  try to clear enemy cavalry from the hill so their infantry can take the hill. The changeable weather stopped many charges from taking place as it stopped infantry firing, if they were not in a village and cavalry could not charge.

A highly enjoyable game and very good company.

Further photos of the game are here.

La Belle Alliance Part Four

Hello There! I have made some progress on the La Belle Alliance building. The previous part is here. Since then I have washed the whole in a watered down wash of black paint. The tutorial that I have been following suggests using ink. In the past I have found that inks do have a habit of fading a bit. This was a different colour ink and on figures. In this case I presume that a wash of Vallejo 950 black paint would suffice. I applied a wash of watered down black paint to all the bricks and then taken some 400 grit sand paper and rubbed all the bricks down. I wondered what this would achieve but could see that the concave shape of the bricks caused by the embossing process was alleviated. The bricks had a flatter surface now.

I was following the instructions from tutorial by Emmanuel Nouaillier in the January 2026 edition on Continental Modeller.

It was at this point that I realised that I had missed a step out!

After embossing the foam core he recommends airbrushing the surface with two layers of Humbrol 'Neutral Grey' enamel paint. I feel an Vallejo equivalent would suffice. Anyway I inadvertently missed this step out. This did cause a few difficulties later.

When this is dry I then used various colours dry brushed on the surface. They included 982 cavalry brown, (main colour), 909 vermillion, 829 amarantha red, 957 flat red and mixed some of these colours with a small amount of black to obtain a number of different shades.

I would suggest when applying a vastly different shade to dry brush along the brick course as when a wall is built the bricks are usually taken from a pack and different shades of brick are usually present longitudinally. Some brickies do mix the brick packs before they lay them but this does not always happen.

This is the point that I realised what the airbrush layer of grey was for. The bricks, even after being light sanded had a series of groves in the surface. Although this was realistic the black wash was not adequate to fill this grooves in the brick surface. I applied a second black wash, were I could see this problem, to fill these creases. 

Here the end of the building has had a layer of white weathering powders applied and the powder has been pushed into the mortar joints using a dry brushing brush using a stippling action. There are some bricks that have a darker shade. This is a combination of an addition black wash and, as I felt the white mortar was too stark so mixed a black and and dust colour weather powders together to dull this white down.

Here is what the side looked like after just applying the white weathering powders. As you can see the powder, despite having a damp, (not wet!), kitchen towel, dabbed over them, the weathering powder tends to be trapped in the pitted surface of the bricks. I got over this by reapplying the dry brush colours over this. When happy with the finish I applied fixer for the weathering powder.

Here is a closer view of the side of the building before the reapplication of the brick colour. For added realism I picked out the odd brick suggesting that it had 'blown' and the frost had damaged the front of the brick.

I hope to have all four sides of brickwork completed by the end of the week and start the window frames and doors started.

La Belle Alliance Build Part One

Hello there! I have started revamping some buildings associated with The Battle of Waterloo. I have begun with Napoleons headquarters so that I can judge how best to do this work so that I can progress with the other buildings, Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte. 

I started off with this. I started by stripping the doors and windows and removing the roof and end extension.

This gave me the bare bones of the foam board shell. Here I have added some depth to each end as I had completed the next step below.

I searched the internet for reference material. I found that some representations of this building had made a number of mistakes as there was a few differences to what the building looked like during the battle and after a number of changes had been made.

The sepia illustration above was the most accurate I could find which was contemporary with the battle. I was completed a few months after the battle.

The black and white picture is from Adkins 'The Waterloo Companion' That shows some smaller windows under the eaves which were a later addition. Lastly on the front facing the road the left hand doorway was bricked up. In most models it is a door.

There does not appear to be any detailed pictures of the rear of the building. There is a well and a separate building behind but this is not included in this work.

I obtained some graph paper and started a scale drawing with the reference information I had. I also needed to take into account the dimensions of the foam board model I had to work with and the spacing of the doors and windows to make them look right.

Once that was done I then photocopied the plans and glued them to a sheet of Canson Foamboard. This is a much higher quality foam board than what is available from the likes of Hobbycraft. It is denser and is sandwiched with two sheets of cartridge paper. It is much easier to peel of and leaved a clean area which can be impressed with brick much more easily.

The wider dimensions, between the above plan and the foamcore shell was different. The plan being much wider. I added some further width by cutting some cheaper foamcore board a little smaller than what was already there and glued them to each end. The final ends where cut in Canson foamboard so I could impress a brick end to it later.

This also gave me the final width for the front and back and ensured that it would all fit together with no overlapping.

As you can see above I have started to cut out the doors and windows. This gave me the opportunity top enlarge them, to suit 28mm figures more easily and take into account the thickness of the plasticard which will be the door surrounds.

Next I will fit the doors and windows

Battle of Quatre Bras 16 June 1815

Hello there! I have started to catch up on some of the games I have attended at the New Buckenham Historical wargames Club.

The original buildings at Quatre Bras, are now sadly demolished. I visited the site in 2016 and the area was boarded off but I managed to get some photos of the buildings before they were lost.

These are 3D printed buildings.

There were plenty of extra figures on the table.

The Waterloo Panorama has these figures on it. These are Perry Sculpts.

This was a very enjoyable game with many club members in attendance.

There are further pictures on the New Buckenham Historical wargamers Facebook page here.