More of the 79th Regiment of Foot (Cameron Highlanders)

Well, it's been quite the busy week. We're into crunch time for our March issue of Wargames Illustrated (#281 - Artillery Through the Ages), which means a few extra hours in the evenings spent on the mag, tweaking text and layouts.

I have, however, managed to get the 79th Highlanders completed. These are all Victrix Limited models from their Highlander Centre Company box set. I like the amount of crisp detail on the Victrix models, although that comes at the price of slightly more brittle plastic (not so good for the bayonets).

The colonel in the center, mounted on his horse, is also from Victrix. I'm not sure if he would have actually worn the Cameron tartan around his body, but I thought it would do a better job of tying him in with the rest of the unit.

A couple of posts back, I promised I'd put up a tartan tutorial, specifically for the Cameron of Erracht tartan worn by the 79th in the Peninsular War. A few weeks ago I saw something similar on The Miniatures Page (aka TMP), but can't find it again, so all credit for the format goes to an unknown hobbyist out there (please feel free to comment below if it was you or a friend of yours).

Anyway, on to the step-by-step. As the Cameron of Erracht tartan is primarily dark green with blue and black, with a red pin stripe, I decided to start with by painting the kilts blue. In this case I used Ultramarine Blue. The second step was to paint evenly spaced vertical stripes in black.

The third step was to paint horizontal black stripes. These were slightly thinner than the vertical stripes, and slightly closer together. The blue blocks that remained are meant to be rectangular, rather than square, a feature of the Erracht tartan. Step four was to paint vertical green stripes. I used Orkhide Shade for mine. These stripes allowed a little bit of black to show on each edge.

Step five was to paint the green horizontal stripes, again using Orkhide Shade. This was followed by "highlighting" the rectangles where the green stripes overlapped. I used Snot Green for this step.

Step seven was to paint some of the vertical red pin stripes. The original tartan has two per green stripe, one per blue stripe, and then a couple more separating them. I decided to simplify the process (and not go crazy) by just running with a vertical pin stripe through each green and blue stripe. Horizontally there are fewer, so I opted for a single stripe through the green horizontals. I used Vallejo's Flat Red for this.

So there you have it. A fairly simple method for breaking down a complex pattern into its parts. I know it's not completely true to the tartan, but it still looks good on the tabletop, which is what matters in my books.

So here they are again, the 79th (Cameron) Highlanders, ready to defended the colors (from The Flag Dude) from the Frenchies!

Cheers

Dave

PS. I've added a few new blogs to my blog roll on the right, but I wanted to point out the new Flames Of War Unofficial Blog Ring. Essentially, this guy is trying to get a blog ring going that emulates the support for 40K blogs provided by blog rings like From The Warp and Bell of Lost Souls (amongst others). If you are into FOW, head on over there and help get the ball rolling. Once I have some more regular FOW posts on my blog I'll throw my hat into the ring too.