Africans

Africa was further represented by two more pieces.

 I made a figure of King Maqoma of the Xhosa Tribe. A simple piece - this was a Preiser conversion mounted on a W Britains horse. The cheetah cape turn out was sculpted from putty.
This piece is now in a private collection.

 A more ambitious piece was that of the Wodaabe tribe, based on three figures. I was inspired by an article in National Geographic where these treibesmen would don fancy clothes and stand in a line with their gleaming teeth, singing songs to woo the ladies. One of the pictures showed a figure with an umbrella to shield him from the hot sun. This was converted from various bits. I used several 1/35 scale components mixed with 1:32 scale parts to represent the smaller and wiry build of these natives.
One of my all-time favourite pieces!

Red Indians

Backtracking from the Historex conversions and World War One figures, here are a couple of Red Indians. These were early explorations into ethnic figures for which there are no commercial figures available then. Both these figures were made about 30 years ago.

 The Jicarilla Apache figure was sculpted over a Historex Horse conversion.

The Crow Indian on  a Buffalo Hunt was more challenging. The bison was a very hefty metal home casting, animated with some epoxy putty. The Indian was a Preiser conversion. I got the idea of a young Indian making his first kill and dipping his hand in blood.
This piece is now in a private collection.

World War One Bombardier

An unusual subject as it involved research and sculpting of the ammunition harness, and gas mask respirator.

This piece was modified later.

World War One William Coltman VC

This vignette was scratchbuilt using some Airfix and Scalelink parts.

This remains one of my favourite pieces.

Le Sacre

This was a very ambitious diorama based on JL David's famous painting on the coronation of Napoleon started about 25 years ago. I scoured as much information on this as possible and created a template to place about 80 identified personages in this scene. There are about a 100 figures here. The accompanying photos show the amount of work required. This is very much a work in progress.

A layout of polystyrene tiles was created. To start this off quickly, I used many commercial heads inserted into basic bodies which were then placed into position. Sculpting was done in batches, I worked on the priests, the marshals, the princesses etc, as the style of costumes was similar within each group. The central figure of Napoleon and Josephine was converted from the Historex kit. As the intention is to place this scene within a box diorama, all the figures are completed only when they are visible from the front. The back of all figures remains unfinished to speed up the work. Many figures are also completed on the upper half. Groups of figures are pinned together to create groupings and provide stability to half-finished figures within the group.

I paint all the figures as I finish them, to provide a colour key for this project.

I have since dismantled this scene as the project was collecting dust. The figures are now stored and labelled in a converted suitcase for protection. I continue to work on selected pieces over time.

Joachim Murat

I really like modelling this personage. He had character and a certain panache in his dress sense. There are two Historex kits of Marshal Murat as King of Italy and as Grand Admiral of France. All of his costumes were designed by himself.

The first model was based on a famous painting by Jean L Gros. The Historex horse was converted to fit the pose.