Peter wrote:Great progress on the animals, and the chickens of course! I also like those stands you made for them.
There may be more on the way - I found another box while i was looking for something else, but I may save them for another project.
Peter wrote:Why don't you use paper tissues soaked in thinned down woodglue for the cloaks? Now it looks very heavy indeed.
Put simply, I am more comfortable with this.
I have found that the tissue paper method ends up giving me too many small wrinkles.
A few years ago
Hat Industry was trying out illustrators for box art, and he put up samples from one guy and the big issue for a lot of people was the folds and winkles. The illustrator persisted in painting in too many small wrinkles so that the figures looked like they were wearing silk or a thin man-made fabric instead of a heavy wool or
serge. These materials - especially the wool, tend to fold in smooth large folds, so I prefer thinly rolled putty, shaped and rolled round a cocktail stick or a paint brush handle.
Having said that, the Miliput I used on the figures in my previous post was awful - it was old, it was crusty and didn't set properly. I had to redo the half cloak completely.
The half cloak figure
I'm not a great fan of half-cloaks, I prefer my cloak to come down to about the level of my calves, the same as the cloaked figure I used as
Cyrano de Bergerac. There doesn't seem to be much point then otherwise. (In fact I still don't understand why we don't still wear them.)
Half-cloaks can be worn in one of two ways, either sitting on both shoulders (like Batman or Superman) or they can be worn so that the tie cords go over one shoulder, and across the chest and under the armpit of the other shoulder and then they're tied on the chest. In the case of my figure it goes over the left shoulder and under the right arm.
Having redone the miliput and re-shaped it, and left it to go off over night, I came back with a sharp knife and trimmed and sanded and filed the edges to clean it up. Once the surface was clean, a little more trimming and sanding, and I was happy with it.
It was painted to match the original picture, so Vallejo Scarlet with various earth tones to lighten the colour and acheive a sort of 'pink velvet' effect (don't ask).
Pretty bad picture - I'm sorry, but the figure looks alright. He will go into the Roaring boys & Bravos group (young men out on the town, with their best clobber on, and bags of attitude.
The person who inspired this, was really happy with it and is telling people that he now has his own action figure!
What I am aiming for with the thrown cloak, is for it to look like the swordsman has swung the cloak around and out to the left, giving it room to spread out as he throws it. He then brings it around onto his opponent.
That's the plan anyway!
The issues with the Miliput were resolved by painting the surface with UV cured resin, (you can see the light reflected on the resin in some of the pictures) which allowed me to shape and sand it, to thin out the edges and shape some of the curved shapes better. The resin also acted to bond the Miliput to the figure better - the cloak kept rotating around the figures arm.
Here he is with a coat of paint - he is going to have a white doublet, white scarf (sash) and dark blue breeches.
I think the cloak will either be a light grey or a mustard colour eventually, the brown just isn't working for me.
Eventually I went with an off-white for the coat, using a thinned 50/50mix of white and Desert Yellow, over the base coat which had had a coat of the dirty wash -in effect it was pre-shaded. From there I worked the coat up to pure thin white. I did something similar with the scarf (sash), started with a thinned 50/50 blue/white mix, then lightened that up to nearly pure white. The idea was to get two different shades of white so that they didn't blend into each other visually.
The cloak started as Desert Yellow, shaded up with white, with edge highlights of an almost white shade.
The breeches - blue with white decoration and all the rest is pretty staright forwards.
He'll do. I'm happy.
I will fill that gap under his base with superglue and baking powder.
This week I have also been digging around looking to see if I actually have one of the IMEX Pilgrim sets. There is a lot in that set that I have problems with, it's a very stylised view of the pilgrims, but there are some figures that I can work with. Couldn't find one, so I guess I will have to order one.
What I did find was more of the IMEX battlefield accessories, a box of Pegasus Animals, a couple of sprues from the Revell 30YW Swedish Artillery, some of the Italeri Napoleonic Artillery horses - a whole load of useful stuff, but no Linear A Roman Senators (damn!).
The two main things I found were a box of the Hat Pontoons and wagon - why that is useful will be apparent in a moment, and the Orion Hussites and their wagon.
I need more wagons for the street scenery.
Referring to Eduard Wagner's
European Weapons and Warfare 1618-1648, the section on transport includes these illustrations.
And these coaches.
( I did find an IMEX Stagecoach but the differences are too great for me to use it as is, and I do have a coach somewhere but I think I might have to make a new one.
If you look, you will note that the bottom central image of the second picture shows a
pontoniers cart, so I will probably do one of those, using the limber from the 30YW Swedish Artillery set..
The first picture from Wagner shows a series of high-sided carts with a side ramp - a bit like this:-
from the Orion set.
I reckon it is close enough. I will add some hoops to support the canvas tilt, (and I may use tissue paper for that,
), throw some stuff in the back and set it on a base like the hay wagon.
3 days Later
This is one b!tch of a kit
. It's hard plastic - which is good, and it glues with Tamiya Thin, which is my styrene cements of choice. But it's fiddly. I'm lucky I have an idea of how carts work (my father made 1/6th scale model carts and caravans, so I was exposed to carts and things like that at a tender age), as otherwise it would be a tricky build, as it was it was coming together, but then it started fighting back.
One of the two front wheels shot off into the parts-eating carpet, that took nearly an hour to find, and then only because I was looking for another part. At one point I was going to use two wheels from a Strelets set, but then the missing wheel turned up.
I drilled the top edge of the body rim, and added the hoops for the tilt out of styrene rod. The fact they aren't even in height isn't an issue, and I will be using a tissue of some description to make the tilt itself.
The under-carriage with the Strelets wheels.
It doesn't look too bad, it will certainly do as scenery.
I am so glad that people enjoy this thread, thank you all for your kind words, it keeps me going on this.
Stay safe all, Pickers.
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