"Painting guide for Lissa 1866" Topic

Before I start down the long and arduous road to researching this topic in obscure texts, rare paintings, oblique references, and educated guesses, I thought I'd better ask:

Does anyone know of a good painting guide for the Austrian and Italian fleets at Lissa?

I'm pretty sure I have encountered some in the past, but memory, discovery and epiphany are all proving elusive. I have always thought gaming this battle in miniature epitomizes the worst excesses of hyperfocused niche obsession miniatures gamers are prone to, so I've always kind of ignored it. Then Pithead released a full set of the Lissa ironclads in my preferred scale (1/1200), and I already have a growing fleet of wooden steam warships for the period that can fill in the unarmored back ranks, so… I jumped right into this niche obsession with both feet. Now I have to know what they should look like so I don't kick myself later for doing it all wrong.

- Ix

I recognise so much of this, but "hyperfocused niche obsession" is particularly painful …

Difficult to parse, too. :-)

In remember asking something similar:

TMP link

I would go for mid to light grey for all Italian Ironclads including the funnels, Black or Charcoal Grey for the Austrian Ironclads. The wooden vessels of both sides were the traditional black, with white stripes along the gundecks, the paddle frigates and Avisios had black hulls and white upperworks and paddle boxes with black funnels and the Austrian gunboats were painted all black.

Free wargames rules has a link to a battle of Lissa ruleset in the naval category and that set contains a link to full color paper models. Only side views but at least a place to start.
Always thought about doing this battle myself as the whole 1866 thing is very interesting to me.
Hope this helps,

Tom D

Those paper ships are on the juniorgeneral.org website and they look beautiful. I think they have all the ships at Lissa,, so you could do far worse than to copy those!

Photographs of all these ships exist and unlike the Junior General's ships, none are painted brown. Why would you need to make things up when these warships are all well documented?

Not all of the pictures of Lissa are perfectly accurate.

Thank you Phil for this synopsis:

I would go for mid to light grey for all Italian Ironclads including the funnels, Black or Charcoal Grey for the Austrian Ironclads. The wooden vessels of both sides were the traditional black, with white stripes along the gundecks, the paddle frigates and Avisios had black hulls and white upperworks and paddle boxes with black funnels and the Austrian gunboats were painted all black.

That seems to be about the best I'm going to get. Black outer hull sides and white stripes along the gun rows were a long-standing international tradition by the 1860s, so those parts I would have guessed with or without a photo. I would not have guessed white upperworks and paddle boxes without a lot of research and discussion. The gray of the Italian ironclads is only obvious in idealized paintings.

I'm not sure what color the artist was trying to capture for the hulls below the waterline in this painting. Is that supposed to be copper?

I like to paint the below-waterline hull an accurate contrasting color, because it adds a nice little extra bit of flair to gaming models.

The colors of things like boats and the decks and structures inside the rails are a bit of a mystery, so I'll just have to make it up. I tend to use differing rail colors and varying shades of deck tan as distinguishing features of otherwise identical ships, to ease tracking during gaming.

- Ix

There is a book "Rakouské válečné námořnictvo 1848-1866" (Austrian Navy 1848-1866) by Ctirad Beneš and it has a color plate with funnel markings of the Austrian ships at the battle of Lissa.
They were all painted differently for quick identification purposes.

From H.W. Wilson's "Ironclads in Action" vol. 1, page 235 (1896 1st edition)

'The Austrian ships were black, and the Italians, by a happy idea of Persano, were painted light grey, so there was little risk of making mistakes. The Austrians had further coloured the funnels of each vessel differently, so that they were easily able to identify their own ironclads, but the Italians had shown no such prevision. Tegetthof's orders were clear and concise – "Ram anything grey."'

Excellent! Thank you.

I'm totally going to have to use "Rammen sie alles grau!" in Lissa games from now on. :-)

Now I have to find some references indicating what colors the Austrians actually used on their stacks – and how much of the stack was painted. A stripe? A portion? The whole height?

The pictures above are no help.

Sřrensen seems to show them painted all the way up:

Actual photos won't help with colors, but might at least show how much of the stack was painted. I'll look around when I get more time.

- Ix

As an aside: Avalanche Press is working on a game of the Lissa campaign called Hearts of Iron. As usual, the page for the game contains some links with fun, brief history essays:
link
link
link
link

- Ix

You will need to check and double check anything you read on the Avalanche site, errors abounded in their Battles of 1866 synopses.

I have some detailed info regarding the fleets and especially the Austrian one, which had unique funner markings during that battle. I'll see if I can find it and share it. Obtained it through the Austrian embassy who had a good contact for Austrian naval info, many years ago.

Terry

Yellow Admiral I wish this fairy story was true, but Avalanche Press has been promising this game for far longer than a decade. I long since gave up holding my breath waiting.

LOL! I only noticed Hearts of Iron recently. I had no idea it had been in limbo for a long time.

It doesn't really matter. There are already a similar Against The Odds game called There Must Be a Victory, and a recent David Manley game Broadside and Ram written specifically for miniatures. I own both.

- Ix

Terry37 said:

I have some detailed info regarding the fleets and especially the Austrian one, which had unique funner markings during that battle. I'll see if I can find it and share it.

That would be fantastic! I hope you can find it. I would definitely like to make use of something like that.

- Ix