Private's Progress

St. George's Volunteers (Gillray Cartoon from Wikimedia)

Poor old Private Schultz. He's never going to break any records for beauty, though he's perhaps not as ugly as the characters in a Gillray cartoon. But if the Guiness Book of Records had an entry for the greatest length of time taken to sculpt a figure, he'd be a contender. I am making progress, but it's very slow due to the number of errors I am making on the way.

Schulz -Some cleaning up left to do

The 'affair of the right hand' will serve as an example. I did manage to sculpt what I thought was a pretty good hand. It wasn't quite 'Staddenesque', but it was a servicable hand with the requisite number of fingers and generally satisfactory proportions. But a right hand has to be attached to a right arm of the correct length: and it was there that I failed. So the hand had to go when the arm was lengthened, and now Schultz is blessed with a new hand which, despite being in an anatomically better position, somehow doesn't seem to measure up to the standards of the old one.

Schultz's legs and feet have been completed and a base added.  As noted by DC in the comments in the previous post, there was a certain 'sauciness' about the legs that would have been suitable for one of Marshall de Saxe's actresses, but entirely inappropriate for infantry of the line.  Hopefully, this has now been fixed.  The figure is now as good as my current skills can make it, so I will be trying to make a mould after I have had a few days to convince myself there really is nothing else I should try to do.

Track Sections (Unpainted)

All this fiddling around with milliput is generating appreciable quantities of unused putty. Rather than waste it I'm putting it to good use making track hexes to add to my stock of terrain. The milliput is smeared onto paper as thinly as possible before ruts are drawn into it. I could use plaster of Paris for this purpose, but that would be at the risk of considerable warping as the plaster dries out. None of the modules are painted as yet: this process uses spray paint and so I need to complete all the new terrain before I can economically spray it all in one go.

Private Schultz

The photos show the current state of affairs with 'Private Schultz' my master figure for Reichsarmee musketeers. Hopefully, they demonstrate some improvement in technique from my first attempts.

At this point I am torn between hastening to complete the figure so I can start painting, and the need to work a lot more to bring the figure up to a higher standard. This figure, if successful, is likely to be the progenitor of the troops for at least three infantry regiments (almost 150 men) and so every improvement made now will be of considerable value later.

The pose will be March Attack.  At the moment I am planning so use brass rods for musket barrels, so only the wooden stock needs to be included on the figure.  If I tried to cast the musket using gravity casting I'd have to have a short and excessively thick musket.