Now I cut back arms and legs of the wire armatures to their respective length, and added resin boots to all three figures. I bent the wires into the desired poses and started to add hands:
Adding boots and hands
Sculpting
Armatures for scale figure sculpting
I just started to redo the figures that go with the Panzer I and the PaK 37. Here, I would like to show how I build up my figures.
I start with building an armature from wire. I take two pieces of wire (e. g. brass, 0.6mm), and twist them together to form the “spine” (pictures 1 and 2). I then bend the arms and legs (picture 3), and add a “neck” made from a short piece of wire to the spine (picture 4). Finally, I partially fix the armature by adding a “pelvis” and a “chest” from Magicsculp (picture 5):
To get the size of the armature right, I searched on Google for a skeleton picture used by artists to help in painting humans. This was then scaled to 1/35 scale and printed. So I can check the appropriate size of my armature by simply placing it on the printout.
Converting a SS soldier
The very last figure to add to the scene will be a SS tanker that is sitting on the scout car. I will use a figure from Alpine for this one, which has to be slightly converted:
The first picture shows the original figure that is standing upright.
I cut off the legs right under the uniform jacket, and also cut off the lower parts of the legs, so that I can reuse the boots and the lower part of the legs. Then I inserted an armature made from copper wire into the parts, that resembles the pelvis, the legs and a part of the spine.
The last picture then shows the legs bent into their position on the car.
Following that, I fixed the pose by adding putty to the wire armature. Not nice, but it works:
Finally, I added the new trousers legs and details like the flaps, and the braces. Now the figure is ready for painting:
And that is how the finished figure looks like:
Russian peasants
Looking back at my sculpted figures, I realized that I have to practice and to refine my skills there much more. I browsed through some war gamer sculpting web sites, looking at the different techniques used.
Then I decided to redo the Russian peasant couple from the Panzerbefehlswagen I scene. I started creating armatures using two pieces of intertwined copper wire, that was then strenghtened using putty at the chest and the pelvis region. Then I added shoes and also a head (only temporary):
I then bent the armatures to their respective poses, and fixed these by adding putty to the wires. It looks quite ugly, but it does the trick.
Then I added again some putty to build up the body proportions, and started with the clothing. The peasant has his trousers added, and to the female figure I added the upper part of her dress, as well as some stockings (as far as the will be visible below the dress:
Now I have finished the two figures, but unfortunately I did not take any pictures while I was sculpting. So these are the finished figures:
Both were sculpted based on historical pictures, like the original figures I made. The guy got a cap, as I did not really like his original hair style. I also changed the legs of the peasant figure, as I had two nice legs available from another conversion project.
Now the figures are painted:
fieldgrau - military scenes in scale 