Things have been a bit slow lately but the arrival of the school holidays means I've been able to put some work in on this figure. Originally intended as a bulky figure as a companion to the Imperial Guard, inspired by some concept designs from Sucker Punch of WW1 German steam powered zombie soldiers in gas masks.
I started with a simple wire armature wrapped in card and masking tape to get the basic body shape. The armature is sunk into a block of mdf for a base, the feet are then built up using plastiroc (DAS). Below you can also see that a roll of card has been added to the leg to creat the boot shape.
The head starts with a small ball of paper and tape onto which I've built modelling clay, The plastic eye sockets of the gasmask he will be wearing are sunk into this and the clay smoothed round them
Early on I added a piece of dowel as the breathing tube of the gas mask but this didn't look right so was removed later on also the groove you can see was to allow the breathing tubes to slot in, they didn't fit as planned when I changed the design later.
The hands were made from thin wire twisted into an armature and covered with thin strips of masking tape
A small shaped piece of card was added to give shape to the hand and the whole thing covered in masking tape. The hand is given a coat of pva to add strength and stop the tape peeling off.
Then the hand is attached to the figure. Quite often at this stage individual fingers are the wrong length so I chop them down, you can see the cut edges below.
Much later on in the figures progress I add gauntlets. These are made from pieces of thick brown paper (courtesy of the scrapstore) stregthened along the edge with thin wire so I can bend them to shape.
