Tin figures fair at Kulmbach 2011

The weekend of the 13th-14th august we were pilgrims to the tin figures fair at the small city of Kulmbach, nortehrn Bavaria. This is the biggest fair in Germany, happening every second year in august. We found a lot of manufacturers from whole Europe, new for me were the polish ones from Krakow: Krakus figures: www.figurines.com.pl
They fabricate excellent figures in the scale of 54mm, Thomasz Kusion introduced me in his work.
Shortly said, there wasn´t a lot of our preferred scale of 40mm, it seems that this is not the trend in collecting. Only Matthias-Manske had a big desk with hundreds of marvellous figures, where I bought immediately a batallion gun with crew for my saxon army, which is under construction on my table...
What you see on the pictures are the figures of the saxon manufacture of Peipp; wonderful figures, excellently painted and posing in very funny ways. I like them and would wish to combinate them with our 40mm armies, but also here, the scale is different: the exposed Peipp figures were in 54mm. But at the homepage, I found some figures in 45mm, with this typical, very expressive faces, see here:
http://www.peipp-miniaturen.de/shop/45mm_figuren.php

So, a wonderful weekend with a lot of impressions.

Mademoiselle Anush is as fascinated by the figures as her father...

An afternoon at the fair is quite tiring; Mademoiselle Anush and her sweet Tatar mom.

Swedish Regiment Dalarnas

This is one of the nicest results of our big sumer battle in Switzerland; my brother Felix starts also collecting tin soldiers and he focussed his emphasis to the swedish army during the SYW. As beginner, we decided to do most of the figures with moulds from Prince August - easy to do and faster to paint as others.
Which you see is the regiment Dalarnas, one of the swedish provincial regiments. We are still not sure, which tone of yellow Sweden used during the SYW: if you see at the swedish-russian reenactments, the yello is clear like a sunflower yellow. If we look at older sources (Knötel and others), we see a more curry-yellow. The second one is our preferred choice.
You can see the less details at this figures, thea are also smaller and thiner than other collections.
Thanks to Steve Cady who gave me the link to Prince August´s new edition of pikemen, we will order now this 2 moulds and complete a swedish phalanx: not really up-to-date to the SYW, but very efficient in our battle games against cavalry.
The flags I did in Photoshop, using some basic symbols found at swedish sites and built the details and shadows myself.

New book edited: Der Weg nach Leuthen -The Way to Leuthen

This is the reason for my absence the last days: Matthias Manske, the Manufacturer of figures, wrote a manuscript some years ago about the background of the battle at Leuthen 1757. He also built a quite impressioning diorama with hundreds of figures.
I offered him to layout this manuscript and to edit a book. A research of old maps, sources, images began and we completed the book now this week.
Manske writes in an exciting way about the the role of Prussia in the early 18th century and puts focusses also on Great Britain, France (including the consequences of the SYW to the french revolution), Austria, Russia and Sweden. The battle reports of Kolin, Roßbach and Leuthen are described in details and explained from different points of view.
A lot of maps from the digital archive Marburg and pitcures of tin soldiers complete the book.
See here some extracts of the book:

You can buy the book at Matthias Manske: matthias.manske-zinn(at)web.de