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Hi all !

I'll be starting a Imperial guard army themed on the Napolenic Highlander regiments, and I'm wondering what you guys would think would be the best way to recreate the feathers/plumes ontop of their hats,

I'm looking to recreate something like the pictures below,



I'm thinking green stuff would be the best method but waht techniques do you guys suggest I use to create a good authentic look to the plumes ?

All help and comments would be greatly appreciated guys

Cheers
Wolf

Does no one have any thoughts ?

Anybody

Hi Wolf,
Hopefully I can describe what I'm getting but this is a technique that I discovered while modelling grass on a figure base! Anyway. Obviously you'll greenstuff/miliput. Get yourself a sewing needle. Now here's the tricky part; you'll have to do this in vertical rows or bands, quickly drag the needle vertically ,dig the needle in deeper ,aim for leaving a ragged end of greenstuff(don't go too far) you should end up with something like the letter 'I'. Now start putting lines the same size all the way round,creating a band. You should end up with this; IIIIIIII. next create another band the same width above and so on. With the red feathery thing do the same but go horizontally.
The whole idea is to tease out the greenstuff with the needle just enough to get the fur texture.
Hope you can follow what I'm getting at, not sure I do.

try

http://victoriaminiatures.highwire.com/
http://www.perry-miniatures.com/

Slipstream I think I follow what you are saying, not entirely sure ho I'd go about that for the vertical plume but I'm pretty sure I get the rest !

Sadly Victorian miniatures doest have the hats but the kilts and other bits I am very well aware of ! But thanks for the heads up on there.

Perry miniatures doesnt have a highlander regiment that I could see of so no use there, I am awatre that Victrix does a set but I'm not sure if the hats will be the right scale for the imperial guard !

If anyone has any comparison shots or knows of any I would love to see them !

Standard pipe cleaners? about the right "fluffy-ness".. might be worth a shot.. possibly even twisting a pair if they're not thick enough.. Worth a shot.. J

Ahhh ! That could work, would the paint not come off those easily though ?

 Wolf wrote:

If anyone has any comparison shots or knows of any I would love to see them !

The Victrix are about 1 mm taller than the Perry miniatures - so the same for our purposes...

On an entire army...for something as common as this...I wouldn't bother to sculpt my own. There are dozens of companies who have heads which can be put on the chopping block, and I seem to recall a few who do separate heads for stuff like this as well (I know Warlord has a bunch of heads as metal accessories - but I haven't looked to see how many are plumed like these).

If you only had a few to do - or wanted to bother with casting them...

The tuft is just fur. Their are several tutorials for doing fur with GS. Make a blob about the right size and then use a needle tool to scratch the texture. The feather is just a feather. Make a feather shape and then use a needle tool to scratch the feather (since it is a single unsupported feather, you might want to make an armature for it out of brass though). There was a tutorial posted a month or three ago regarding making wings...same deal, only instead of a few hundred feathers - you only need to do one.
_____________________

Went looking for the tutorial, and didn't see it here (probably is...just missed it in the mess of things) - here is the link though for wings:

http://xenite.wordpress.com/modeling-painting-and-hobby-articles/how-to-sculpt-bird-wings/

The same method used for the hair in this thread applies to the tuft, fur tutorials are a dime a dozen though it seems...so you will likely have something bookmarked already:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/242387.page

Well I am going to be making about 30 of these soo buying and cutting would be the best option, I'm curious to see the scale of a victirx head to a Imperial guardsman.

If the scale is roughly about the same and some small GS work to make them look good would be all I need to do I'm sold !

As far as the paint coming off.. I've found different types of cleaners.. ie. some more of a plastic thread, and some fine enough that felt a bit more thread-like.. it might take a little playing with between spraying, or even thick brushing the hairs with paint, can give them more of a shape as you go.. or even watered down pva? might be a tad tedious, lol

Aye well browsing the web has revealed that victrix would be a bad choice as the scale is way off, Peryy miniatures eem to be the better choice I think. However I think their highladners are metal, and come in very small numbers !

So not very efficient or cost effective