Anatomical Angst

The first half of the mold for my marching infantryman is drying out. Its been over a week now and the surface has only just solidified: I suspect I didn't use enough catalyst, so it will be best left a while longer. In the absence of anything else to do I've continued fiddling about with the Suren personality figures.

Nice Figure, Shame About The Legs

Almost every horse I use is the Stadden H1 standing figure. The only exceptions to this is for the colonels of infantry regiments who use the H2 walking figure so they don't get left behind by their troops who are inevitably moving forwards in march attack pose.  I decided that for the Suren personality figures I could use a wider range than this, amd as a 'daring' experiment I bought one of the H10 horses. This noble steed is rearing in a dramatic manner, that is just begging to be used by the more flamboyant kind of general (or possibly any gentleman who has difficulty controlling his horse).



On examination, I was surprised to find what I think are a couple of flaws in this figure. This is something I am reluctant to admit to: Stadden served in Mule Pack Transport during WW2 and so his knowledge of equine anatomy was on an entirely different level from my own. However, I decided not to let the flaws pass because they bothered me, and fortunately I have only myself to please.



The first problem was the front right leg. This seemed to have telescoped considerably and had to be shortened to match the left fore leg. I chose not to cut the leg down as the legs on this figure are rather flimsy: instead I build the ground up beneath it and modelled a new hoof using Milliput.  The second problem lay with the bending of the neck. The inside edge of this had a considerable arch to it that looked wrong to me. Photos on the net - with one exception - seem to show that the horses neck would compress rather than arch in this area, so I chose to fill the arch in with milliput. Right or wrong, the new neck looks more believable to me.



Having attached rider and reins as per usual, I applied the usual black undercoat and a light drybrushing of white as a preparation for painting. This is the stage at which the first photo was taken. What seemed to be a satisfactory figure when viewed as bare metal, doesn't look so good when undercoated: the noble steed has rather bent, thin and nobbly upper legs. I could straighten them out a bit, but I have decided the figure would benefit from a little bit more preparation, filling the insides of the upper legs to create a most robust set of limbs. Oh well, time to scrape off some black paint and break out the Milliput again.