Going Full Circle.

  Eons ago when I was a young wargamer I started collecting my first 'proper' wargames army. Naturally it was a French 25mm Napoleonic army. In those far off days decent information was in very short supply and like a lot of wargamers back then I relied on Blandford books which invariably contained beautiful images of random but colourful regiments. Naturally I painted these units, blithely ignoring the historical orders of battle.
   It wasnt that I didnt want a realistic army containing regiments which fought at specific battles, just the information was in very short supply. I loved the uniforms of the Irish Legion and the 7th 'Africa'  Neopolitan line regiment, so they were included in my army, Corsican Light Infantry, got them, Romana's Spanish Division, yep painted them to.
   It didnt bother me that these were seriously second rate units in reality, they were pretty and were in the Blandford's.
  Eventually as more information became available I replaced these units and finally changed scales, to replace them with accurate regiments, brigades and divisions. Accuracy was paramount. I would research every corps of my growing armies and make certain that it contained the correctly painted regiments.    

  For years I chased this 'wargamers Holy Grail' as if the accuracy was the most important thing in my hobby.  However as in most things in life, you go full circle and with my latest small project I have returned to collecting and painting historical units that bear absolutely no relation to the brigades they actually fought with. I just want  an eclectic mix of the exotic, famous and quirky. Hence the Tiger Zouaves.  Colourful, short lived and probably not that effective, but what the hell.

  I am now painting up Coppens Zouaves to complete my first brigade of the project. Probably not too historical, but they are great to paint. The Tigers are a mix of metal and plastic Perry figures.

             The initial brigade, minus the unpainted cavalry movement trays [ for Neil ]