finishes his first squad of Chaos Space Marines.
There's been a lot of enthusiasm on TMP lately about Reichsmarschall Siegfried Von Sylboudöring. Everybody agrees that he is a great character, and a figure is eagerly awaited by the whole community. Yet, even though we live in the Golden Age of Miniature Gaming, no manufacturer has done any.
Problem is, I badly need that specific figure for this summer's Iron Dream Tournament 4. When you organise a tourney of such importance, you have to offer motivating and well-devised scenarios that will have players get the best out of their tactical skills.
One of my plans was therefore to offer the capture of Reichsmarschall "Ziegfried Von Zylboudöring" (or "Zed") – I really didn't want any trademark trouble with the Negromundheim lawyers, who would have told me that the real Reichsmarschall was taller.
Fortunately, as often happens when I stumble across my piles of unpainted figures, I found by chance a long forgotten figure that would perfectly fit the bill: Titanos, a figure by Lance & Laser. It had a diaper, boots, and no hair, which immediately qualified it for the part.
I immediately grabbed some greenstuff and a tool, and searched another pile of minis to see if I could find one with a Luger. As I couldn't, I clipped off a six-gun from the hand of a ShockForce Deadtech figure. There was some Araldite at hand – now I had all I needed to begin working on it.
I began adding greenstuff along the legs to do the high boots. The original figure already had short boots, which sped things up.
As I had some greenstuff left, I began sculpting the hair from the top of the head to the neck, added the moustache, and sculpted the braces on his back.
Once the putty had cured, I sculpted the front braces – I did them flat at first. Don't know if I was right or not, but I felt I'd better not do the ammo holders straight on the figure.
I finished the long braid, and added the suspenders going from the diaper to the braces.
The last step was finishing the ammo braces by simply adding putty sausages on the flat braces and pressing them with the cutting edge of the sculpting tool. I had to have regular looks at the illustrations of the Reichsmarschall, so as not to forget important details such as the buckles on the braces.
Here we are. I stuck the six-gun in his hand with greenstuff, which allowed me to remodel the fist at the same time, then carefully finished the joints with Araldite.
