HOME-MADE HUNGARIAN KNOTS and MORE HUNGARIAN ARTILLERY (WIP)

Romanian Cavalry displaying Ed M's Free-handed Hungarian Knots!

Despite closing my last post promising to do something simple after a long string of conversions and hussars, this post, dear readers, finds me steeped in another involved project, one with figure conversions, equipment assembly, and some rather involved painting schemes.  Go figure.  At least I'm returning to something I've done before...

...More Hungarian Artillery! Dig those crazy candy-stripes!  

For my current project, I decided to expand my available Hungarian artillery from 3 to 6 batteries in order to give me the flexibility to stage larger games.  The first ten days of the project have been consumed with assembling and painting the guns and converting the gunners. Readers unfamiliar with this blog may wish to peruse the earlier post on the conversion work involved with producing these units.  I am now engaged with  painting the gunners...  

..."What," I hear you asking, "does any of this have to do with hungarian knots?" Well, I'm glad you asked.   Having now painted an entire Hungarian army, along with a smattering of similarly involved uniforms  here and there, I have become immersed in "hungarian knot-ology."  And, given that I'm adding these details to a set of figures at this very moment, I thought I would take this opportunity to share my technique for free-handing hungarian knots (and similar loopy things) to figures that don't have them.  As usual, you may clix pix for BIG PIX.

My hungarian knots begin life as three solid discs on the cuffs (in this case, red)...

 ...which I then fill-in (in this case with black) to create the loops.

There's still cleaning up and whatnot to be done on these figures, but I think these shots convey the idea.  In this case, the red on brown is low contrast, so I do red details on the thick side in order to help them stand out.  Additionally,  I filled-in the loops with black for the same reason (I also underpainted the lace lines and pockets in black to help the red stand out).  For finer hungarian loops, you would just make the dot inside larger, which would cause the loop line to be thinner. Except for the odd command figure, I generally stick with three loops on a cuff, which provides about the right amount of definition when viewing with the naked eye at game-table distance. 

In about another week (ugh, am I slow!) the new gunners will be ready to join their already-finished comrades (above) in the Hungarian Artillery Park.

For higher contrast combinations, I fill the loops with the uniform color.  The red on white in the top picture nicely illustrates the three-loop rule of thumb.  For braided knots, I add braid-colored dots last (in the above case, the loops were first done in yellow and the black dots were added last to give the braid effect).

This process works equally well for trouser knots. 

 There: the secrets of Hungarian Knotology revealed!

Excelsior!