Markers Made - Muskets and Blades!

    After the White Plains game in Tarrytown a month ago, it seemed to Jared and me that we could use some additional markers to indicate infantry units that had used their "First Fire" bonus, and also Leaders who needed to check for survival on the next Army Morale card. With the big Semiwitz game coming on, and some time off Thanksgiving week, it seemed a good time to produce some.

    From all the Old Glory cavalry I've been painting recently, I accumulated a large stock of spare parts that seemed to me to be ideal for the purpose. Many of the Old Glory Napoleonic Cavalry come supplied with Carbines. However, these have to be glued in place on the assembled horse and rider. Not happening as far as I am concerned; way too fiddly for my tastes, plus highly likely to come off as the troops are manhandled in the heat of battle.  However, they seemed to me to be tailor made for use as markers, battlefield debris, or the like. It turned out I had about 80 of them!

So, I glued the lot of them to 1 inch round MDF bases, using white/PVSA glue.  (I had so many carbines that I ran out of my supply of these, so the rest were glued to thinner and slightly smaller (about 20mm diameter) wood circles bought by the bag in 3 assorted sizes at Michael's craft stores at a very low price. Once the glue dried, they were sprayed with white primer. 

Many of the old Glory cavalry also come with separate sword arms; there are usually quite a few more arms than are needed for the figures in each bad - it turned out I had about 25 spare arms. These were glued to the largest size of the Michael's Wood circles (probably about 30mm diameter), and once again primed once the white glue had dried.

I then painted the elements - just dark brown and Oily steel for the carbines, and for the Leader Check markers I used 4 different color schemes for the "arms" Dark blue faced red (French/Prussian theme), Dark Green faced red (Russian theme), Red faced dark blue (British theme), and White faced light blue (Austrian theme). The sword blades were painted silver and the hilts Old Gold. 

The markers were then flocked - for the carbine/musket markers, I used thinned white glue with a mix of fine dark green and golden yellow flock - this is a different mix from my other markers ("Chickens" and "Rocks"); this was intentional to reduce the chances of mistaking them for a different kind of marker.

The Leader Check markers got flocked with ultrafine Dark Earth flock, once again very different than my other markers. Between the obvious design, larger foot print, and different flocking, there is little chance these will be mistaken for something else!