Mounted Infantry and Volunteer Rifles

I have been keeping busy repairing and painting and converting old Britains 54mm toy soldiers for my various games.  My main buying strategy for these is lots of broken figures or incomplete figures. I end up with a lot of Canadian Mounties as as result.

However, I did luck into 3 South African Mounted Rifles figures, and since my The Men Who Would be Kings variant has 5-figure cavalry units, I figured I'd paint two of my extra Mounties up as SA Mounted Rifles instead.  I was so happy with the result, that I went ahead and painted the other five extra Mounties I had as well, giving me a nice big unit of 10!

A mighty brigade of South African Mounted Rifles!

Matching that olive drab was an absolute nightmare, and in the end my version is a bit darker.

You can pick out the 3 originals versus my 7 copies by looking for the lighter shaded jackets.

Overall I am quite pleased with the result, and look forward to these deploying in my next game as two units.

Same group but in two lines of five.

Next up is six figures representing a unit of Volunteer Rifles.  These are headless Britians Guard figures (usually with the rifle tip broken off as well), to which I was going to add replacement regular army home service helmets.  The idea to paint them as Volunteer Rifles was last second. I based the paint scheme heavily on the Cheshire Greys Rifle Volunteers covered at Suburban Militarism.

Volunteer Rifles

The paint shade is a dark gray but possibly the combination of the white undercoat and gloss varnish has given them quite the blue sheen which I like.

Volunteer Rifles

Next up is an assortment of lancers that I can finally finish repairing. Thanks for looking!