Soldier King update

 While the blog has been quiet for a while, it's not due to inactivity; rather a combination of being busy at work (albeit at home) and miserable weather has prevented my intended post.

The army of Bravance has been based, flagged and labelled; the intention was to take some pictures but a lack of time and fine (or at least dry) weather has frustrated this. Indoors would simply be too dark.

The process was not without incident; I started without a clear plan, cutting out the balsa bases, sanding them before painting with a suitable green emulsion (Wilco test pot). Disaster! Some of the larger bases developed a noticeable warping.

My intention was to apply self-adhesive magnetic tape (Poundland) and I realised I should have applied it before painting; whether alas it would prevent warping is another matter. However, a quick search on the internet revealed warping balsa is a common problem for model aircraft modelling. So armed with some suggestions, I glued the bases to some paper, covered them with a suitable combination of plastic and paper and applied some weights (a couple of bricks and some volumes of Janes).

24-hours later and while the warping had gone, only on some had the paper dried and stuck. The others simply peeled off.

Removing the figures from their temporary painting bases produced another disaster! Several had glue overlapping their bases and when removed lost green paint and varnish! It was a case of removing them all in order to repaint and varnish the bases.

My initial thought was that I could then glue the figures to the bases.

It was only then then that I realised it would be more practical to apply the magnetic tape first; more importantly, it would be a lot easier to add flags to the standard bearer before he was struck down. There was however a problem........no flags!

Flags had been an issue; after several abortive attempts I had parked my efforts when my ideas for producing something on the PC (as well as using some old GW decals with similar heraldic emblems) fell through.  Now however, I realised I would need to do something. I had the basic design from when I began the project, but now tweaked them slightly to make them more C18th and "Germanic".

I had bought some fine drawing pens with a vague idea of using them for the flags and they now came into their own. After drawing the designs in pencil then pen, I ended up painting with acrylics, touching up mistakes with the pens and paint.

They turned out different from my initial ideas, but in some ways more in keeping with the figure painting style. Sadly, I didn't think to photograph the sheet before cutting them out. Most were applied without problems, although a couple ended up wrinkling as I was applying them.

Magnetic tape went on OK as well as the labels initially, some started peeling almost immediately and I have a feeling they will need sticking with a stronger glue. All this took much longer than I was expecting. In the interim, the figures had to be carefully stored as they were now unbased. I therefore pushed ahead with sticking the figures to the bases. I'd initially thought I'd use epoxy, but by this stage as there had been several hiccups, I just used PVA (so I could easily rebase if something else went wrong!).

Having learnt from this, Hrvatska has had the flags done as the first step. All being well, I will see if I can take pictures first. Even this has not been without incident; I used some flags printed from the PC without emblems. Unfortunately, when I applied white acrylic, the red ink bled through turning the white eagles pink! I managed to correct this but thought I had another disaster on my hands!