F is for Fontanini - Part 3 - Waterloo

Or at least the 'Napoleonics'. Hard to tell if this is a set of eight, or a set of ten poses, I suspect the giant ones are (or include) poses/pose variations not found in the line's smaller sizes? There is also a pair of mounted figures in the same line.

I've been asked not to add too much waffle to this post by another author who is preparing an article on them for Plastic Warrior - so after the verbiage of the last two posts I'll try to keep this text-light!

Looked at the other day in the fun post on size, they are really huge and weigh kilo's! I don't know how big they are but you can judge from the other figures in the shot that they are 800mm+. Neither pose seems to exist in the smaller sizes.

You don’t fly these back to the UK or the 'States unless you're wealthy (but then you'd need to be pretty well-off to buy them in the first place!), but you could drive them home - although they might need they own passports?!!

Their smaller brethren, these are the same size as the Rococo/Regency couple and pirate we looked at yesterday and have been given - in the case of the foot figures - the same washed-out, subdued hue, finish.

The same can't be said for the two mounted figures, who have been given a supremely attractive, even 'classy' finish, subdued palette again; but the subtly-weathered, solid colour gives them a real campaign feel, the horses too, are lovely.

Fontanini produced their mounted sculpts as pairs, primarily for the tourist trade with the result that when they dipped their foot in the 'Toy Soldier' market by scaling-down to 55/60mm, they ended-up with a lovely set of cowboys and Indians with lots of foot poses but only two mounted figures and one horse pose for each set of protagonists!

Another PW show-purchase, I think these have been repainted by the end-user, but it's a neat job in flat, matt colour and gives them the appearance of just stepping out of an old print. They seem to have been numbered in sequence, unlike the Rococo figures where my two are over a hundred apart - in a set of four!

The guy with the musket across his chest is a new pose from the previous image and missing from the eight are a dismounted Dragoon (French)/Life Guard (British) type, a [British?] Grenadier in busby and an [Austrian/Russian?] Grenadier in mitre-cap. Similar headress'ed figures of guidon-bearers and drummers appear in the larger Carrara sets

Hope that's brief enough P?

Back to Fonplast tomorrow.

J is Just for Fun!

How small is the Smallscaleworld?

Well, we can make it 10-pixels-by-ten-pixels and using an external hard drive could put up to what . . . twenty terabytes . . . fifty terabytes in the single folder? I've got about 45-50 gigabytes at the moment, but a lot of that is 9 years-worth of blog images!

We can of course reduce the title considerably, and throw the folder into space to make it look even smaller! But the Icon is now 18x18 pixels . . . it's grown - Doh!

Ooh, what's this tool here? . . . OK, 9 pixels by 9 pixels; that's better!

Let's reduce the folder title to the minimum and camouflage it!

In fact, why bother with a title? Let's just point at it; now it's hard to see! That's about as small as I could make the Smallscaleworld without Microsoft coming up with new icons!

Or . . .

. . . we can go the Fontanini route and decide the Smallscaleword's over 800mm! Yes, that's nearly a meter!

Of which -  two inches are the base-lump of Italian Carrara marble which caused the behemoth of a figure to come into being. I shot these at the PW show a couple of years ago, it's some show wot 'appens sometimes, don't know when the next one is - probably missed it!

Sold as mantle-pairs, there were 8 sculpts (and a pair of mounted figures with lovely relaxed horses) in the smaller sizes (Fontanini produced these in many sizes from 60mm upwards and many finishes), but I don't know if more than one pair were pantographed-up to this size. You can see some of the 8-inch figures bottom left in the shot.

The Carrara marble gift shops had/have tons of this stuff, and the bases utilised the 'flawed' marble off-cuts, the prime building-material and/or sculpting marble being prized for its pale grey hews; polishing to a lightly striated white, not the dark grey with white bacon-streaks (marbeling!) of most of the bases you find on the Fontanini-supplied figurines.

There is a single figure of the right-hand pose on Etsy at the moment for 103-quid (an odd number, but presumably dollars-into-pounds? I didn't study it too closely!) which is as much as you'd want to pay for a Capodimonte porcelain one, but to be honest, if you keep an eye on charity shops or local auction houses, you can pick these up for £15/20, or only a few quid for the smaller ones; I recently picked-up a couple of the Rococo 'gentry' for 6-quid the pair, and saw a set of six of the chinoisery figures for a pony*!

* That's £25 for the overseas readers . . . £20 is a score, a monkey is £500 and a donkey is a dog is a lemon is a shed is an old car!