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Distraction: Greta's Revenge

The First Sketch

As soon as I had the story I also had the drawing for it and the final idea was born (fig.1) During the modeling stage some of the ideas drawn out in the sketch were slightly modified

The Figure

This was the first problem and with that also the first challenge. After looking around in my scratch box for parts to scratch built my sniper out. I discovered that I didn’t have parts that would satisfy me for what I wanted to do. I was looking for parts to make a sniper that lay down on the ground aiming his gun. And he had to wear the distinctive White winter outfit.

So I thought that if I don’t have it, I'll make it myself and so be it. I first started to look for scratch parts that I could use. These were a left arm, a right hand, the head with helmet, the boots and the shovel and ammo container. The rest of the sniper I had to make myself. The body was made with DAS clay (the white variant) this is some kind of modeling clay and it dries by air (no baking or other hard things involved) and I modeled the different parts of the body. While I was doing this I used a Sniper from the DML kit as reference for the measurements. I sculpted the two legs, the lower body (part where the legs touch the body, underside of the parka), the upper body, the right arm and last but not least the hood of the parka (fig.2) As the clay was a bit old I still had to do some extensive putty job too (fig.3 & 4).
As I had all these parts I glued them together with ordinary CA glue. With some woodworking tools that I found in my fathers work shed I scribed in details like sewing lines and the webbing he is wearing (belt etc.)

Next came the painting of the figure. I used only humbrol colors for the painting of the figure. The whole suit got a layer of signal white (fig. 5)(don’t know the paint nr.) Let that dry. Then I painted the webbing and the boots in the color black and a little khaki (fig.6). The head was already painted and I only painted the helm again as the white paint stuck not very well during an earlier paintjob. The helmet also got a layer of humbrol signal white. And with some fine touches of German grey to get the effect that the helmet was thrown down a couple of times and that the paint chipped a bit. The gun, shovel and ammo pouch were already painted. The burlap to break the silhouette of the gun barrel was made of a teabag glued to the gun. The glue went through the whole burlap and as the glue dried it became rock hard. I just painted it white and finish