Husaria - Building a Polish army for the 1620s

Trying to keep up momentum I’ve moved on to another unit of Hussars. This unit is made up of a mixture of The Assault Group (TAG) and Foundry riders, as before, but this time on TAG horses.  The TAG horses are nice clean sculpts and most have some fancy feathers etc. which are very suitable for the noble Hussars, who liked an ostentatious display. They also have a single pistol holstered on the right side of the saddle.  This is a nice touch as firearms were becoming popular with the Hussars in this period.  I’m not so sure about carrying only one pistol, but I expect someone out there knows if this is right?

I’ve added wings in twos, or singles, to most of the figures, but left some without.  In this unit the wings are attached directly to the horse, rather to the equivalent position on the rider figure.  As covered in the previous posts, I have decided to have wings ‘saddle mounted’ (rather than fixed on the rider’ backs) in ones or twos as limited to the richer / more showy individuals in the unit. The wings are a mixture of the TAG wings and the Foundry wings modified to be the straighter, earlier type.  The TAG horses have a slot modelled at the back of the saddle to take wings.  The Foundry riders needed some chipping and filing to make them fit in the TAG saddles and I had to keep riders and horses matched during the painting process so I could be sure of them fitting together at the end.

Although not always strictly historical, I like to have a colour theme for my units.  For this unit I had chosen a blue and yellow flag, with matched pennons, from Battle Flag.  I therefore decided to carry on this blue and yellow theme to the horse trappings, and also the Hussars’ cloaks and helmet feathers.  I chose to use a few different hues of blue to add some variety while keeping within the overall theme.  I used Vallejo’s Prussian Blue, Ultramarine, and Pale Dark Blue, and then shaded / highlighted each of these.  I also wanted to include red on the hussars as this was a popular colour with wealthy Polish nobles in this period.