Combining My Hobbies

A detachment of the 10th Bengal Lancers on patrol as part of the Tirah Field Force in 1897.

 

Truth in Advertising time: I'm a retired Colonel of Infantry and a Military Historian. I'm also a 100% Disabled Veteran. Now that sounds worse than it really is because I have a great quality of life and a beautiful bride of 37 years. When you fight bad guys with bullets, loud noises, loud explosions, jump out of perfectly good airplanes, concussions from fire fights - your body and mind tend to wear down after a while!

The Last of the Mohicans.

Anyway . . . painting helps in more ways than one. I have been an avid collector of toy soldiers at least from elementary school, started painting them when I was about 12 and wrote my first rules when I was 16. Two years ago I started to learn how to do watercolors (challenging and therapeutic) and now I am combining my two favorite hobbies. Mainly inspired by Bob Murch of Pulp Figures and his photography (and some others) I decided to start using some of my landscapes as backgrounds when taking pictures of my miniatures.

The above is one of my first watercolors as I was learning how to use water to get the desired effects that I would want in a painting. The entire painting was done using Blue Indigo and the ratio of the water changes the color.

And it makes a good background for a picture of The Batman.

This is the first person I painted: A Muslim officer of the 10th Bengal Lancers. After I painted the dashing gentleman, I thought to myself, "Self. If you can do that in watercolors you can definitely do it with miniatures. Hello Perry Miniatures. 

The 10th (The Duke of Cambridge's) Bengal Lancers (Hodson's Horse).

With practice I got better. My painting of a Sowar of the Johdpur Lancers has won 3 prizes:

I will eventually paint this unit in miniature but I will need to do some conversions. As I dove into watercolors while continuing my first and foremost hobby of miniature painting and gaming, I started doing more research on the actual uniforms - leading to sketches and other paintings. This really helped me with painting my miniature men. Longtime readers of the my blog know that for the last 3 years or so I have been heavily concentrating on the Army of the British Raj.

Pencil sketch of a Sepoy, 30th Punjabis circa 1900.

Recently I found one of my old pictures of the Khyber pass . . . this would be a great backdrop.

Pencil sketch of the photo.

Watercolor.

The Gordon Highlanders striking a pose.

Well I have been having some fun combining my two hobbies - now it's time to do some more backdrops, figure painting and gaming!