Four medieval types, two foot, receiving
and two mounted in the charge, all in pretty full armour. Well-mounted on a
piece of pretty inflexible Perspex or
similar and not over-landscaped they are painted not in the super-realistic oils
of competition flats but rather the black undercoat with flat colour and
'sausage-finger' highlighting (really only to the horses furniture) favoured by
a lot of war gamers these days, and they look good for it.
I don't know if this is Mr. Evan's own work
or something he picked-up 'out and about'? If I had a large house or museum I'd
have found them shelf or cabinet space, but I don't, and having straitened
damage to all the long thin bits and stood a figure back-up, the chances of
further damage is too great to keep them like this, so they were removed carefully
. . .
. . . and added to one of the foam-core storage
sheets for miscellaneous metal flats! Two unpainted shiny new cuirassiers have
rather collected all the flash as they charge at a lifeguard (I tried several
camera angles/flash settings, but flats are flats and are easily distorted!) and
I will now be tempted to paint the kingly knight (he has a coronet) with
battle-axe, started by an unknown artist years ago, to join them.
To mount the new figures I had to move the
rather chunky demi-ronde WWI ANZAC MG No.2 (or is he an Italian with that
semi-bowler hat?), leaving an unsightly dink in the row above the them, the
other dinks show how by using a couple of sheets for spares, they get tatty,
when there are enough for a thematic, set or maker-sheet they can be lightly
arranged until they look right and then pressed-in to a 'final' resting place!
Also evident is an ACW officer missing a
sword and what looks to be an Eriksson or 'after-Eriksson' home casting,
semi-flat WWII German paratrooper. The sheets are pre-cut with a new scalpel to
about half-foam depth, a rulers-width apart. Sheets with small parts (like the
artillery set we looked-at here a few years ago) get extra, short, cuts between
the main lines to help enhance/balance the display.
The other diorama (really they are both
small enough to be technically 'vignettes') was this one, which is a more
commercial thing altogether, the rock painting with wet over-brush in 2nd
[only] colour is very 'factory' in aspect as are the off-the shelf trees and
barely decorated figure.
The real question is what was it for? I
know some makers (Noch, Bush and in the past Faller?) have produced/are producing
little pre-prepared vignettes to include in larger model railway layouts as
'instant detailing' or points of interest, but the heavy foam base - still
heavy after an unknown quantity has been removed - suggests it may be more of a
stand-alone thing?
Is it a tourist memento of an actual cave
somewhere? Or could it be from a jewellery/trinket box, music box or something
of that ilk? Collectable lid? A 'no need for watering' decorative terrarium?
Fish-tank ornament - it'll float but he'll drown! The figure is so poor he may
have been added to something which isn't supposed to have a figure at all?
The trees are unusual in being a soft PVC
and the foliage is the more modern foamed fragments rather than the saw-dust clumps
or flock of yesteryear and - although civilian - the seated figure looks much
like the [Russian?] driver of Airfix's old
SAM II Guidline Missile kit!
Whatever the origin, being more robust than
the flats; this has been given its own little box and saved 'as is' for
posterity - thanks again to Peter Evans for both.
No comments:
Post a Comment