European Baroque Period

My interest was never in merely collecting miniature figurines. I had always wanted to make my own miniatures. However, to start off on this blog, this was one of the earliest assembled and painted  Tradition model figure of The Duke of Marlborough. The piece was mounted on a simple round wooden base. This was considered the standard of quality of specialist model figure makers at that time.

Even then, it was obvious that this style of sculpting did not particularly appeal to me. The detail was too simple, the figure was rather top heavy and perched on thin legs. I did re-work this piece at a later date.

My references for my next two figures came from an old Blandford book, written and illustrated by Preben Kannik. This was a great and inspirational little book full of colourful costumes.

 

For my own Marlburian period English officer (King's Troop), the scene would be that of an officer cleaning his boots after a battle, and then spying a battlefield souvenir helmet. Using a Verlinden head, I made up two boots converted from the Airfix Cuirassier set.

Without using an armature, I made up a lump of Milliput epoxy putty to juxtapose the head and these two boots.  As this looked good, I added more putty to create the shape of the coat and the details. Arms, sash and hat were added later. The feather was detailed. Buttons were pressed out from tubing. At that time, I avoided creating too many wrinkles in the clothing, concentrating mainly on achieving the overall appearance. This was another early period figure, made just after Diana The Huntress.

And then I made another similarly garbed French officer standard-bearer, of the Carignan-Salieres regt, serving in Canada. Legs were taken from an Airfix Musketeer set. The flag was made from paper, painted and then wrapped around a brass flagpole. I read somewhere that they usually kept bears as pets or mascots. The bear was a toy animal. This particular piece has suffered from an eventual browning of a Testors matt varnish which had been applied to create a matt effect.