Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest

Here are some pictures of a command stand I painted up to command a Brigade of Confederate Cavalry. As usual, the miniatures are 10mm GHQ. The riders were done with the same sort of technique as the 4th Tennessee Cavalry riders, by leaving thin black lines in recesses and between different colored areas, instead of inking. The horses were also manually shaded and highlighted, instead of inking. They turned out decent, I think, but the method does take more time, and I definitely need some practice to get better at it.

Some might think it is a bit strange that I use officers such as Forrest or Hood to command brigades in my armies, when they were quickly promoted to higher commands. I am mostly interested in gaming the Civil War at a tactical level, moving and positioning indidual regiments. Since I am using small miniatures, I can still fit a large formation on the table, but my goal is just to have about a division of infantry for each side. Therefore, in order to have most of the famous personalities from the war make an appearance on my table, they have to be commanding a brigade, or a division at most.

So either I will be gaming battles very early in the war, before these officers were promoted past command of a brigade or division, or I'll be playing in some alternate reality where for whatever reason they didn't receive their promotion quite so early. In this way, I'll still be able to have the likes of Jackson, Hood, and Forrest on the table, even though I'm only using about a single division.

Also, though I am using historical brigades and the regiments that actually were in those brigades, the "division" I am creating for each side will be one that never existed, and will just contain the brigades that I want to paint. For the most part, the same models can be used to represent different regiments and brigades, or even just generic regiments, so for the most part it hardly matters who I intend them to be as I paint them. But it is kind of nice to have it in my head while I paint who I am intending to represent.