Tales from the workbench

Nice! The use of an Ebob armature is particulaly interesting to me...since I have a bunch of them on my paint station that I've not been sufficiently motivated to try sculpting on yet . The wine cork base is also a good indication of scale!

What do you base your historic figures on? I assume you had to do some research before sculpting these guys...or do you know what they look like because of your historical gaming?

And a 1:35th Jewish temple priest? Are you making an Indiana Jones 'Arc of the Covenant' diaroma then? .

Ogre pirate.

This one was really hard to photograph, possibly due to the contrast between the dark torso and almost white legs.

He needs alot of work, and I haven't actually decided how he's going to look when finished. Not a recommended way of sculpting. He just warps and mutates everytime i poke at him.

Argh it's all inspiring me to try my hand at sculpting figures . I still need a 15mm figurehead for my balsa wood canal ship.

Latest installment in the irregular series of tales from the PitYak confinement area.

I've had the two least productive weeks imaginable. Last week the flu had me written off and unable to do anything, and this week I had to go to my best mate's funeral, so the ensuing bottle flu left me little better :X.

Because of all that, I've done little but get out the backlog of orders I had. Even still, I've managed to get a bit of paint on my latest civil war figures, The Louisiana Tigers, and I even invented a a way of making flags (I think).

On 20mm plastics, the flags from most manafacturers are notoriously bad. Usually too small, with molded on designs (often inaccurate) and wobbly shafts. The first thing I do with plastic colour bearers is replace the flag. Depending on the pose, you can often get away with just chopping off the top half of the shaft, sticking a pin throught the hand into the body of the figure, and adding a flag from paper or foil or whatever.

Usually though, the colour bearer is standing with his arm outstretched away from his body, holding the flag in one hand. The easiest thing to do here is push a pin through the hand and into the soft plastic base, giving two solid anchor points. A standard pin is too short, so you need to find longer pins or cut a bit of music wire to length. Since I've got several hundred normal size pins, I thought I'd find a way of using them, this is what I came up with.

1 Cut the head of your pin, and push through the hand of the figure, into the base. Or, stick the pin up through the base then through the hand. The second method is is a bit trickier, but more secure ultimately.

2 Get a piece of brass tube just big enough to slide over the pin, and as long as your flag is tall.

3 Cut out your flag from lead foil. Make it the height you want, but a little wider. Super glue one edge to the brass tube, then wrap a lyer of foil around the tube. You can wrap more for an unfurled look.

4 Dribble some super glue down the pin, and drop on your brass tubed flag.

Afterwards I thought you could do without the glue, and have interchangeable flags for different units.

If you want to go the extra mile, it's also easy to make a little spear head to go on top of the shaft, make it from or on a pin, and it'll slide down the brass tube.

Hopefully this awesome example of grpahic communication will explain a bit better

Some more grenadier miniatures;

Wizard and little green imp familiar



Priest



The brief here was to do a priest who wasn't exactly clean cut, so idecide on a kind of drunken, unshaven appearance.


And here's a better pic of the dog and palladin

Tools don't make you any better, as I've said before I went to my first sculpting interview armed with only a tooth pick and scalpel blade.

Course, I'll happilly sell you as many tools as you want

I own dozens, but only regularly use about 6 or 7. I could happily get away with just my clay shapers and homemade spats if I was on a desert island.