If you didn't laugh, you'd cry...

I've got a good sized collection of 25-28mm Sikhs from Foundry and Old Glory. About 10 years ago, I painted most everything up and based it for Volley and Bayonet. I put on the Battle of Ferozeshah about once every year at local conventions. It's a fun game and it's visually impressive.

A few years ago, I realized that all the Sikh infantry had been painted with white cross brace straps across their chests. While it looked good and it match the British uniform style...it was also wrong. Those straps should have been black for the winter uniform and white for the summer uniform (and these guys were not painted for summer!). But, I told myself, it doesn't really matter.It's a minor thing and the period is so obscure it's not likely to be noticed.


Then came today.

I sat down to paint those new figures I got from Studio Miniatures. It had been a while and I wanted to check the color of the horizontal piping across the uniform jacket. So I pulled out my old Opsrey book on the Sikh Army and thumbed through the pages. Ten minutes later, I got a shock.

Somehow, I'd used the wrong plate as the basis for the Sikh infantry. I'd painted all those years ago. I'd been painting the line infantry with red jackets and white trousers.

My typical paint choices for the Sikh infantry.

But there in the Osprey were the plates for the Sikh regulars - in blue trousers!

A bit more prototypical uniform colors.

So what had I done? I'd painted up my entire Sikh Army as if they were wearing the uniform of the elite "French Legion" (also known as the "Guard Brigade".Imagine you've got a big collection of French Napoleonics and you just discovered you had painted every single solider as if he were a member of the Imperial Guard!

All I can say is...D'oh!

So I caught it early enough with these figure to correct the painting before I based the figures. What it means for the games is that I'll end up with two distinct groups of figures - those painted historically and those that are...not. I'm not planning on repainting anything at this time (getting the figures off their V&B bases would be a horrible chore - I used Woodlands Scenic Flexpaste to attach them and that stuff is tenacious!) So they'll soldier on in their incorrect uniforms for the foreseeable future.