Tuesday 15 January 2008

Keep your hair on!

I've now progressed a couple of heads further, the basic fusilier and the grenadier.



This has been done in a couple of stages, first the basic form, for the fusilier this was the tricorne, moving towards a bicorne by this period (which personally I find quite hard to do). The grenadier got a structure upon which to build the bearskin, along with the front plate. The front plate was embossed with devices, but at this scale (don't let the close up photo's deceive you, the plate is only about 2.5mm in height) and with my talents, your joking! So I've roughened it up a bit to "suggest" this detail, this should give a sufficient surface to paint on to give a reasonable impression of this feature. These were then both left to set.



I then added the cockade for the fusilier along with his hair, so that head is now ready. The grenadier has had the fur and bag added to the bearskin, he will still need hair and a cockade and plume, but I've left these off until what has been done has set.



I note that a couple of you are considering having a go yourselves, great! My advice would be take your time, aim to do small bits in a session (remember the greenstuff is only really workable for a couple of hours, so mix up small quantities) build up in a series of layers, letting each one harden, as I'm illustrating here. That way you can "bank" the bits you get right, and if it goes wrong you don't ruin all that you've done prior to that. The key discipline to stick to is when you've completed a sculpting session, decide whether your happy with what you've added, if your not, take it off, while you still can, you can always try again as long as you don't let it set! You will improve with practice.

More heads next time.

2 comments:

Bloggerator said...

I'll bite here - how do you form the tricorne? Do you drop a disc of putty on the head and just turn the edges up? Do the properties of the putty stop the completed confetion from drooping?

This is such a fascinating blog.

Greg Horne

John D said...

Greg,

Yes, I normally do this by creating a thin flat disc, placing it on the head and then pull the edges up, Greenstuff sticks fairly easily, so it doesn't tend to droop. Getting the basic shape is therefore relatively easy, its adjusting it to get the final outcome that's really hard.

Cheers


John