Painting Challenge entries 14-16: Teddy Bear Romans, Saxons and Commandos

Phew! It's been another hectic three months with the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge going on. The last week saw me rushing to finish all projects that were still underway.

The first to finish was my Curtgeld entry. Being a product development engineer I did what I do best and that is copy others and improve :) No time for ingenuity with managerial pressures on your back and a need to get things done! So I went ahead and copied our challenge overlord Curt's first entry of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. I'd actually been struggling to think about what kind of a risk taker I should do, but when I saw the Teddy Bear Romans sculpted by Mike Broadbent I knew that was the thing to do. With them being manufactured by Eureka it was simple enough to add a few to my Saxon reinforcement order.

Next up were yet more Saxons with two more battalions from Regiment von Steindel. With these done I have all the line infantry finished from the first Division and about a third of all the infantry done. As Fighting 15s still hasn't got new moulds for light infantry and grenadiers I'll have to stick to painting line infantry for a while still. Slightly annoyingly the distribution of poses in my last batch was horrible with over 80% consisting of only two poses, and only a couple of examples of one of them. I threw in a mounted officer and a casualty to account for the issue, but I have a feeling in the future I need to start doing some conversions as well. Even with an even distribution of poses there's still only 4 different ones so probably some minor conversions to French figures are in place.

And lastly my Secret Santa gift from the exchange organized by Ian of The Blog With No Name fame and his wife Catherine. I received a blister with a Warlord Games Commando Mortar team. A bit underwhelming as I don't really have any Commandos and it came in an amazon package, but nevertheless it's fun to receive unexpected hobby gifts! These were really a breeze to paint as there's basically just two main colours covering most of the minis. So base shades and a few highlights later they are ready for battle. I've given them to a clubmate who has Commandos so they did find a good home quite fast!