Painted French Napoleonic Marine of the Imperial Guard

 In the last post I revisited my process for making shakos for my Napoleonic figures. Basically my original process of cutting a wooden spool in half, hollowing it out, etc. was a lot of work. Lopping the top of the pawn's head off did remove the step of hollowing out the shako, but cutting was still difficult as I was using a mitre chop saw on a round object, so it was never straight.

Using my laser cutter I was able to cut out a shako shape by essentially slicing it horizontally. With that done, I needed to paint it to see how it looked once done. I needed something with a French-style shako and a plume, so I decided on one of my favorite French Napoleonic units: the Marines of the Imperial Guard, part of the Old Guard.

Interestingly, Funcken has the cuffs as blue, while others show them as having red cuffs. I wonder if perhaps that is the difference between the campaign and parade uniforms because the image above (of the campaign uniform) also does not have the hussar-style chest lace that the parade uniform has. Nonetheless this is the uniform I am going for.

As a reminder, this is the unpainted figure.

My big question was whether I should break out the Dremel tool and sand down the shako brim, making it thinner and more distinct, or rounding out the arms and feet.

Here is the figure, painted to a tabletop standard.

Probably going to touch up the figure a little. If I made a unit of these I would add a cartridge box to the right hip, a pack and bedroll, which means painting the black cross belts, and add a musket and the sword they wore. As it stands, this one will just be a specialty figure that can fill in as a spare gunner, and engineer, or a pontonier.

The only complaint I have is the feet are too long and possibly not wide enough. From the standpoint of the shako though, if the slices don't line up perfectly – and they did not in this experiment – then you really want some sort of gap filler or you should sand. I tried painting gesso on top, but that was not thick enough to fill all of the gaps.

Overall, I am happy with the shako and will be using this process for all my hats now. I can see using it to make an Austrian-style shako, a round hat (although I would need to play with woods of different thicknesses), and others. I might even be able to pull off a WWII German helmet, but I think that will take some sanding.