Gordon Highlander

After the last post I couldn’t resist painting up this Jacklex marching highlander B16. As my reference I have of course used the illustration of a Gordon Highlander Private (1900) from my Blandford “Military Uniforms of the World”, the same source I used for the illustration in the previous post.

My thoughts on this project are slipping more and more towards Old School and as such I will be using this same figure to make up a full 24 figure unit at some point. I think I will probably be opting for simple plain green bases as well in a similar fashion to my Napoleonic forces.

I have kept the painting detail deliberately basic which is also in tune with the Old School theme and will enable me to build up my forces relatively quickly - once I can find some time to pick up a paint brush again that is.

Boer War Project

I was very lucky all through my school years to having some very inspiring history teachers. In junior school my teacher got us making a model of a Norman Keep out of balsa wood and papier-mâché, so much better than just looking at pictures in a book. He also read us stories from the Greek Myths, not history as such I suppose but those stories of Jason and Odysseus really grabbed my childhood imagination.

Later at Secondary School I had another great teacher who really brought everything to life from the royal progresses of Elizabeth I right through to the implementation of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914. I loved history lessons and I’m sure they were largely responsible for my continued interest in the subject right through to this day.

A few years back I discovered in my parent’s house a dusty project folder entitled “The Second Boer War”. It was quite impressive really with 35 pages all written in my own fair hand probably at about age 14 and this rediscovery became one of the motivating factors in my starting this blog. One of the pages contained this illustration of a Gordon Highlander from 1900 shamelessly copied from my Blandford uniform book but still possibly the best drawing I have ever done (click on the image to expand).