Officers And Gentlemen

The rank and file of the Hohenzollern Cuirassiers are almost at full muster. The near completion of this stage has raised the issue of how the regiment is to be officered. I decided (for reasons of vanity if nothing else) that I wanted the entire regiment to be made from my own figures. I am therefore taking one of my trooper castings and promoting him, by craftknife and milliput, into an officer: this will serve as a master for an officer's mould. Converting a figure is easy compared to creating one entirely from scratch, and so at the same time I am converting another casting into a dragoon figure to be used for my second Imperial cavalry regiment.

Hohenzollern Cuirassier Officer

Looking at this photo now I can see the poor fellow is frightfully flat chested:  I shall have to adjust him to more heroic proportions. 

Just to add to the list of projects (and to make more efficient use of the milliput I mix up at each stage) I am creating an improved horse figure. This uses a casting of my first horse as a starting point. I have moved two of the legs very slightly for ease of casting as well as refining the horse's anatomy very slightly.

Horse Begets Horse

The final photo shows the current state of my attempt to sculpt a new infantryman. It took a while to decide how to get this moving. I really needed some kind of physical reference point on the dolly: I didn't make any progress until I hit upon the idea of using the frontal edges of the coat for this purpose. So I rolled out two thin cylinders of milliput and pressed these onto the dolly so they ran along the approximate position I though the coat's front edges should be on. Once these were on I used two shorter cylinders to form the inner edges of the coat tails, and after that I could fill in between cylinders to complete the form of the tails.

Mr Blobby