A Frivolous Action

Soubise reined in his horse and cast his penetrating gaze over the field of battle. Summoning his staff with one imperious gesture, he addressed them with the confidence and poise that only centuries of breeding can confer. "Where exactly are we?" he said (note 1).

And so we have finally arrived at our frivolous version of Action! I hope to write it up over the next few days, but for now here's the photo of the starting positions. Orders of battle for both sides were as in the original battle, save that each had only the one company of light infantry, both possessed a single cannon, and we have used the names of our favourite generals.

The Position At Dawn Viewed From Kornberg's Tent

Note 1: What Soubise said was "Là où sommes exactement nous", but Soubise's schoolboy French was always eccentric. It is a sad fact that, long ago, Kornberg and Soubise sat next to each other in the special duffer's class for linguistically challenged boys in their grammar school.

Pale Rider

My experiment with sculpting is continuing: I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun doing something that I am not very good at. Despite my initial cynicism, I am seeing some progress and there does appear to be a chance that something usable will result.

Dobbin the horse is almost complete. I am still struggling with his head, and there is still his tack to put on. The mane is also proving problematic - getting a texture that indicates hair without going over the top is proving harder that I thought.

Dobbin and Master

I decided to try and sculpt a Reichsarmee cuirassier, with cuirass under his coat, for Dobbin's rider. This is a lot easier than doing foot figures. I found that getting a convincing looking gait on a marching infantryman was beyond me at this stage. My efforts all resulted in various knock-knee'd individuals, or unfortunates hunched over with a severe case of piles. While neither of these are particularly inappropriate for the Reichsarmee, well, it would be nice to put on a better show than that. With a rider the legs must conform to the shape of the horse's back, so that's easier as there's one degree of freedom less to worry about.

I have gotten the basic bodyshape, minus arms, complete. There's no details as yet: I am still adjusting the work done so far. Mostly this consists of paring off pieces of milliput to slim down the figure to more elegant proportions.

Progress is horribly slow. If I was trying to do this professionally I'd certainly starve. The difficulty is not merely in getting the shape of something right, but in avoiding damage - mostly in the form of breaking off recently applied milliput. I suspect that much of this is caused by my doing a lot of the work by carving milliput after it has set, whereas the professional does most of his work while the milliput is soft.

A Survivor's Guide To Sculpting A Horse

I noted in my previous blog entry that my first attempts at figure sculpting were a convincing demonstration that I am not able to create a decent wargames figure. At least not using the standard method of wire armature and epoxy putty: this blog will describe a further attempt, using a modified technique.

The problem, as I see it, is that the wire armature method does not provide a sufficient guide for the geometrically challenged. Once the wire is covered by putty it is entirely hidden, so the sculptor is left to compare his figure with whatever reference art he has at hand. I find this horribly difficult, attempting to find the correct position of a surface in 3D space with no adequate reference point. It occurred to me that, with access to a computer, an easier method could be used. I could take a silhouette of the figure I wanted, and create a 2D template of the correct size. This could then be rounded out to create a fully 3D figure, the edges of the 2D silhouette giving me the reference points that I need.

The method is obviously limited in scope, and is likely to produce a quite 'wooden' pose. But there is one common wargames figure, the standing horse, for which the method is entirely suitable. This would be a handy practice piece and the happy coincidence that it would have a fair chance of creating a usable figure encouraged me to give up on human figures for the moment.

The first step was to find an image of a horse in the public domain that could be used for the template. The one I found came from wikipedia, although with a digital camera there would be little difficulty in taking one's own shot. The image was scaled so that it could be printed out at exactly the size of the completed figure.

A layer of milliput about 2mm thick was applied to upper body parts of the image. Some bent wire was pushed into this at the root of the horses tail to add strength at that point. Once the milliput had set, the paper was torn off, and leg armatures made out of bent brass rod were added, more milliput being used to attach them and give the correct spacing. After this, successive layers of millput were added to give the body its 3D shape. I used a different colour milliput for the later stages so that I could easily see the edges of my original template.

Early Stage Horse

This could all be done quite quickly and without any great skill being required. The greater part of the work lies ahead: where I have to shape the detailed contours of the horse, trying to accurately model its musculature. This is where I suspect that Charles Stadden's wartime service in No.1 Mule Pack Transport Company, RASC aided him in creating some of the best wargames horses ever seen. In place of this I shall be using reference images from the web - a search on 'thoroughbred' in Google images has netted be a huge amount of material to use.

Horse With 'Rough Shaping'

A Man Called Horse

There comes a time in every man's life when he goes a bit mad. He gets married, or he joins the Foreign Legion (or, possibly, having sampled the first he feels impelled to do the second). It seems that it is now my turn. Fortunately, being a wargamer, the forms of madness that are open to me include options that are not quite so hazardous as those available to the mere bulk of humanity. All of which is a painfully long way of saying that I have been having a first few attempts at sculpting my own figures.

There are a number of tutorials on the web on sculpting. While they are useful, I happen to think that they are all in error for one pretty fundamental reason: nobody will be able to create a figure that is up to standard on their first attempt, and they should recognise this before they try. Fortunately it isn't necessary to do this: you can develop your skills by working on less ambitious projects first. In my case I have been using milliput for 18 months now, using it to make a few simple conversions of commercial figures, and making very easy things like trees. What I intended to do next was an evaluation of how far I have gotten along the path to creating my own figures, and the answer was very likely to be somewhere between 'nowhere at all' and 'not very far'.

My first idea was to attempt to sculpt a Grenze infantryman. This did not go very well: two mishappen lumps later I really hadn't anything to show for the effort, although I have to admit it was fun trying. But I had gained a little insight into the problems involved, and my own limitations. Creating an armature and filling that in to create a basic humanoid shape was easy enough. But going beyond that; creating a body correct in all its proportions, and then cladding it realistically was still beyond me.

If I lack artistic ability then I do possess at least sufficient intelligence to look at the processes involved and try to find ways of making things simpler. And I think I have hit on a method that will do this. I'll go into this in a later post, but for now I'll simply show a photo of the progress so far.

'Dobbin' (Right) with Stadden Horse For Comparison

So far I have gotten the basic body shape fairly complete. The legs are still in a very crude state (and parts of the armature are still uncovered) but as they are the most delicate part of the figure I plan on leaving them until last. The hardest part is next: capturing the nuances of a horse's musculature is probably the part where I will fail. But it has been an excellent morale raiser just to get this far.

A Bit Of A Bore (Part 2)

More than 200 Stadden infantry have passed through the recruiting sergeant's hands since I started this project. While the rest now march proudly in the ranks of the four battalions so far embodied, one unfortunate individual - known locally as the 'The Not So-Good Soldier Švejk' - has been separated from his fellows and left to languish in the spares box.

His problem stems from a little bit of crud that found its way into the mould when he was born into this world. Although it missed all his vital organs it found its way into the musket - the most vulnerable part of the casting. As a result, said musket was found to be fragile and, with a minimum of force, broke in two when tested. At the time I had no ready solution to the problem and so 'Švejk' was put to one side. He does, however, provide an opportunity for some experimentation. In my last post I expressed my reservations about the qualities of the 30mm musket: with the offending article broken on this casting I can try some surgery without risking a perfectly decent figure.

As John Preece noted in his comment on the last post, there was a time when Minifigs spears were noted for being rather more like the trunk of a tree than the bough from which a spear was made. One of their main competitors - Hinchliffe - addressed this problem by providing a length of steel rod with every spearman. I intend to use the same approach: using a piece of brass rod to replace the barrel, and to form the bayonet by beating the end of the rod flat. Having epoxied the rod onto the figure, some milliput can then be used to hide any gaps and replace parts of the wooden stock that were also lost when the musket broke.

Our Eponymous Hero - A Reformed Švejk

The accompanying photo shows Švejk as he now is. The task of fixing his musket turned out to be relatively simple: the one 'trick' of note is to avoid thinning the musket until after attaching the brass rod. The rod acts as a guide that can be used to slide the craft knife along, as well as strengthening the softer cast metal so it doesn't merely bend when attacked by the knife.

With Švejk summoned back from the dead. The final question was into which regiment I should put him. This was an easy one - where else should a soldier with a dodgy musket held together with brass rod and milliput go, but into the Reichsarmee? I have painted him in the uniform of IR Furstenberg, details being copied from Project SYW, except I have given him white gaiters.

Comparison shot of unmodified and 'improved' figures

As a repair for a broken figure, the method is (for me at least) a success. I am not entirely convinced that improvement to an unbroken figure would be sufficient reward for the amount of work involved: the last photo allows comparison with an unmodified figure. The original Stadden musket does not need replacement so urgently as on other, cruder, figures. However, the improvement is not only in original looks but also in durability - something that will only become apparent after the figure has seen some use.

A Bit Of A Bore

By the standards of modern firearms, 18th century muskets were a crude device. The Prussian musket of the Seven Years War had a bore of roughly three quarters of an inch. The outer diameter of the barrel must have been a little less than an inch. Yet despite all this, if you look at an example of a musket, you will find it is elegantly shaped and is quite slender when compared to its length.

Firing A Brown Bess Musket (Image from Wikipedia)

Elegant and slender are not two adjectives that can be applied to typical wargames figure muskets. I recognise that we are limited by having to work with figures that can cope with rough handling. The best painted battalion in the world would still fail in its looks if its muskets were bent into a myriad of shapes or, worse still, broken off at the shoulder. But does this really force us to equip our metal heroes with weapons that look like ancient medieval arquebuses?

A musket correctly scaled would be no more than 1/60th of an inch in diameter. A certain thickening of the barrel is going to be necessary if we are to have muskets cast of ordinary metal that last for longer than a single campaign. But is it really necessary to decorate the barrel with metal hoops that scale up to a thickness of half an inch? These might be appropriate on a fantasy dwarf, but I find it hard to accept on an 18th century musket.

The Stadden figures that I use have relatively thin muskets compared to the common crowd. So slender that I find it difficult to store the figures: even just laying them flat, the barrels are prone to slight bending. Minden figures (which I do not own, but admire greatly) have slightly thicker muskets. Indeed their muskets do look rather ungainly to me, although I suspect this is partly because they accompany a figure that is otherwise very elegant indeed.

The Plot So far

It was my plan to refight Action! this Christmas. This was a bad idea: if ever there is a time of year when it is difficult for two men to both find time to fight a wargame, then I suspect that Christmas is that time. It must be recognised that although this is the season of goodwill, the female half of the species will not extend the principle to wargamers who want to sneak off and play with 'toy soldiers'.

And so the only activity has been to muster all my forces, the product of about 20 months work, and see what exactly I have acheived in that time. As the photos show, there are a number of holes in the units currently enrolled that need to be fixed. The two infantry regiments that I painted first don't have static grass on their bases. This is not the kind of distinction I want for my senior regiments. The junior regiments are frequently missing officers and musicians.

The biggest decision I am struggling with involves a possible change of plan. I had originally intended to use all Prussian units for both sides. But I am now thinking about building the 'Imperial' forces using historical prototypes from the Reichsarmee. I have always been fascinated by this, possibly the worst European army in history.