Putting the boot in on Harry

Harry has some new boots! And thank goodness the addition of the sturdy footwear has transformed my figure's looks from Christmas elf lookalike to something a little more soldierly.

I finally feel this sculpture is coming together.

Next job will be to sand down the boots to give them a nice smooth polished finish and also add some folds of material where the trousers tuck into the boots. But we are getting there folks!

Thinking ahead, I have to start to work on arm poses as, obviously, Harry will be holding something eventually. My plan is to do two versions of Harry, one with his walking pose as is and then an alternative where he is standing to attention.

From here - with these two generic leg poses - I can model a variety of standard military stances, by making a variety of arm sets, such as;

• Shoulder/slope arms
• Port arms
• Present arms
• Order arms
• Sling arms

Link: Refer to this British Army basic Rifle Drill Positions web page (Opens in new window)

If I want my soldier to be firing his weapon I will then have to consider modifying Harry into a third leg/body pose - with body angled and legs apart. So I would end up with three figures in the 'Harry' series:

• Harry - relaxed pose (at ease), walking or marching.
• Harold - attention, and basic rifle drill position.
• Henry - dynamic, firing pose or field gun loader, etc.

Luckily, once I have Harry's body done - and duplicated in resin - it will be an easier job to simply convert his body into the other two poses. This should give me the basic tool box I need to make a variety of soldiers.

The uniform's usefulness
I should mention something about his uniform and boots design to finish with. I've tried to pick a fairly generic looking uniform design, one which could be easily used to represent a wide variety of nation's soldiers. Obviously the addition of the high jack boots narrows this universal usefulness, I would - for example - have to modify the figure's trousers if I wanted to depict British Army style infantry (but that would be very easy).

But for a continental European army the jack boots will be a fairly common and useful dress addition. You may be able to visualise that Harry could be the basis for Germanic soldier, or American CW trooper, or - as I had in mind - a soldier of the Balkans. The key to all this universality will, of course, be the headdress - a series of which I will eventually be designing too.

Onwards and upwards dear friends!