Hussars have moustaches, don't they?

Regular followers of this blog will recall I’ve recently started collecting a Prussian force for Ligny, as we had very many French players and too few Prussians. That made me feel a bit like the Kingdom of Saxony, from staunch French ally to Prussian vassal,  and it seemed apt I’d be looking at French plastics for my next project!

My next conversion project is to turn the Perry plastic French hussars into Prussians. I’m using the guidelines from this blog:

http://ploughsharestoswords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/converting-prussian-hussars.html 

Thank you Anders for an excellent idea.

However, I couldn’t just stop there. You know me, I just can’t help it when I have an idea in my head - hussars have to have moustaches! The Perry line infantry (from where I’d be harvesting) did not come with moustachioed heads, apart from two on the command sprue. At two heads per box, it’d take me a while to collect even enough for one unit! Sure, I could always paint the moustache on, but I could go one better… Break out the tool kit, its conversion time!

So I turned to the Perry hussar sets for inspiration. The British and French hussar boxes have a large variety of heads, fit for conversion. Now it was a simple matter of carefully cutting off the old headgear and adding the new Prussian shakos.

These heads are shown without the final touches done to them. There is sometimes a gap between the shako and the head, depending on the angle of the cut. This can be tidied up with a tiny amount of greenstuff. However as almost each one has different facial details, I’m pretty happy with the results. My hussars will look different. Now onto the bodies themselves.

There are three standard poses in the French hussar boxed set.   These generally involve the sabre being pointed skywards, which is fine…, but again I find my hand almost instinctively reaching for the scalpel. We can go beyond the limitations of flat moulding and make the hussars a little more animated.

These are all simple conversions. The arms have been repositioned or swapped between models. I then went a bit further and cut the arms at the elbows to see what other poses I could come up with.

Here are a few more, showing the variety of poses which can be constructed with a little playing with the poses. I’m sure more could be made by combining arms from other sets (hmm, hussars shooting from the saddle?). Now I have the pleasure of finding suitable colours for them. Even the Prussians had colourful hussars, so they don’t have to be just dark blue. I’m tempted to make one unit the 3rd Squadron of the 6th Ulhans who wore hussar uniforms - however as they wore black, it would mean I’d have to master painting that colour. Hmm, time to study some more of Christy’s WSS Youtube videos!