US Navy Shore Party Seaman - Part 1

 Onward and upwards with my 'Assault on Innsmouth' characters! Today I've been working on the second of my six 'good guys', this time a sailor with a honking great BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle)!

Above: My reference source for this figure, illustrations of 1920s era
USN Shore Party members from the China campaign.

I've kinda split my investigative team into two types of members - three are the traditional action hero types there to deal with the physical adversaries and traditional dangers, while the other three are paranormal specialists who are adepts in arcane knowledge. (Though in common with D&D conventions each individual will have their own specialist attributes.)

My seaman will be my 'tank', a very physically strong character who possesses heavy firepower and can soak up punishment. His BAR light machine gun will provide the investigative team with protection from waves of aggressors.

Hello Sailor!
I started with my stardard 3D peg figure, though I have now tried to incorporate a belt so as to make painting a little easier (gluing on a belt - plasticard strip - to the printed body proved a little fiddly and messy in previous figures).

Above: My 3D model file was created using TINKERCAD and I am slowly
creating a collection of interchangeable standard parts.

I was thinking about what other items I could add, but in keeping with my simplified cartoon style of my peg characters I decided 'less was more' and that other details were better just painted on.

So, the main new feature of this particular character would be the sailor's Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) which the US military used as a light machine gun. I wanted a roughly identifiable silhouette though it would still be designed to compliment my simplified 'toy' style. I began by laying down some simple blocky shapes in TINKERCAD (using my standard rifle model as a template for size)...

Above: You can see how TINKERCAD uses simple 'primitive' shapes to
build up your model designs. I wanted to create a rough overall shape that
was analogous to the real BAR but which fitted my 'cartoon' characters.

It actually took a couple of attempts before I came up with a design I was happy with, and I noticed that for these figures that I have sorta over-scaled the guns, I suppose in keeping with the chunky cartoon aesthetic. 

The gun done I printed out all the individual parts to make my peg figure 'kit'...

The only thing that was missing rom this set of components is the connecting rod which acts as the arm attachment 'shoulders'. This I would make out of 4mm wooden dowel (I tried out 3D printing this part but - in my opinion - it was a bit of a waste of time and material when a bit of dowel was perfectly adequate).

NEXT: In part two of this project I'll come up with my paint palette for this little seaman (and I am quite pleased with myself for getting right through this post without making any puns about seaman).