Workbench: Skirmishers

A few quick snapshots showing some innovations on my workbench.

The first is that I started working on a few units which will be meant to be used as skirmishers. I'll base them on the same size bases as regular units so they can fight in closed order, too. But I will use only three minis per base, and try to use the additional space for more varied arrangement of the minis. I also tried to mix more and more different poses to show a unit keeping up low intensity skirmishing fire.

Currently being painted: Wunsch Freibatallion and Jägers. 

For the Wunsch Frei infantry I'll base one batallion, plus two optional stands of Jägers, for skirmishing and one batallion with the regular four minis per base for use in line formation.

I will do the same with two batallions of my first Croat grenzers for the Austrian army.

The tricky thing for unist mixing many poses is to find a balanced arrangement of the minis across bases, and still to place the officers, NCOs etc. in the right place. So for these kinds of units I decided to fix the arrangement before I even start cleaning up the minis for basecoating, and therefore have a number of units arranged on the table waiting to be taken up:

Blanks waiting to be cleaned and basecoated before painting. The firts two ranks are from different units where parts are already further advanced in the production line.

This mini arrangement is even more important for the mixed Grenadier batallions combined from the different Grenadier companies of the Austrian and Reichsarmee units. Sometimes, these even have to make sure people with the right type of uniform and Grenadier hat are in the right place (one of the first mixed Grenadier units I already painted contains the Ernestinisch Sachsen infantry, even mixing different hats, and different uniforms, within individual companies coming from one batallion...).

In addition I'm running out of storage / display space for the table top ready flats, so I have banned some individually based 30 years war troops to card board boxes and will start to use the new space for tabletop minis:

Newly freed up shelf space waiting for tabletop troops. Top row: Reichsarmee infantry and Prussian cavalry (right most minis are individually painted representaties of all Cuirassier regiments, already shown here). Bottom row: 30YW infantry on the march, now in card board boxes, Next to that, Wallensteins carriage and, in front, an experiment to use 6mm minis for a 1:1 scale representation of the central company of  prussian infantry batallion.