Making Prussian Soldiers

Matt mentioned in the comments of the last post he was looking forward to seeing the construction notes. My construction of cavalry is a bit simpler than for infantry and artillery. The problem is this:

Those ugly gaps

When I built my Dark Ages troops (in a hotel room while on a business trip) I made each figure separately, then glued them together, then glued them to the bases (when I returned home). And there were those ugly gaps. Now I could fill them in with hot glue, but sometimes that does not look right.

The second problem:

Cheap plastic tube beads

These things are incredibly cheap and make great legs for the horses. Of late I have been using them for the bodies of infantry too, rather than round or square beads, as I did above with the Dark Ages fyrd. When you add the 'rifle' and the hot glue 'arm', the proportions seem better.

With cavalry, you have two points of contact for gluing – the front and the back legs – but with infantry you only have one, and that one small surface area does not seem to be strong enough to hold. Now I have some smaller wooden beads on the way to replace these tube beads, but I wanted to show how I made the last Prussians.

First, I created a template.

Template for Loose Infantry unit

Wait, what? The problem with the bodies being so much small than the head is that it is really hard to judge the spacing between the figures when you are gluing the smaller body down. In order to ensure a nice formation, the template allows you to plan your spacing. This template has a screen of four skirmishers and a formed body of eight in two ranks.

Clamp the template to a second base

Using clamps and a Dremel I can then drill the holes into my base. Note that the holes in the template will get a little wider over time as you keep re-inserting the drill as slightly different angles.

Do a batch of bases

As I work at home and I sometimes have long telephone conference calls, I can sometimes drill a base or two in the spare moments. No one on the conference call is even aware I am in the background drilling away!

My artillery template

I have even made a template for the artillery. The base is used on the short edge, making artillery bases 1/2 as wide as infantry and cavalry bases, but twice as deep. The gunners will be where the holes are while the limber will be in the backfield, facing away from the gun. Turn the horses forward and the gun is limbered; turn them backwards and the gun is deployed.

Matchsticks

Back to the tutorial. I now hot glue matchsticks into the holes.

Snipped matchsticks

I snip off the excess length of the matchsticks. I only need a short piece to secure the bead. (The remainder of the match stick will be re-used for the next base.)

Hot glue the plastic tube beads on

As you can see, the plastic tube beads fit snugly onto the matchsticks, securing them to the base.

Don't forget to trim the bottom!

I give the bottom of the base a quick brush or two with a sanding block so the base sits flush with the table.

It seems like a lot of work, but it really is not. I may be able to forgo this step by using smaller wooden beads for the body, like 4mm or 6mm round beads, especially if they provide sufficient hold. But as long as I have those tube beads, I will probably need to do this. (Your get 1,000 beads for about $4.)

This next shot shows the figures with the 'head' on. I do not recommend that you put them on at this point. I have only done it for illustration purposes so you can see the formation and spacing.

They are starting to look like Prussians!

For the rifles I use toothpicks or mini-dowels. As I use the points on toothpicks for spears, lances, and muskets with bayonets, it would take a lot of toothpicks, using center the center portion (saving the pointed ends for spears and muskets), so I use Woodsie mini-dowels.

Not as cheap as toothpicks, because you buy them from the craft store

I use figures in firing and advancing poses, along with the figure holding the rifle 'at the trail' and at 'left shoulder arms'. For firing and trail poses, I cut about a 9mm length of mini-dowel.

No, I don't really break out the caliper

Using that one as a model, I cut the others at "about" the same length. For advancing find the ones you cut a little longer and use those. The longer length looks better for them. For the shoulder arms pose, cut them about 1-2mm longer.

Shoulder arms poses should get longer rifles

So I start with the skirmish line in front. I put a small dab of hot glue on the right side of the figure. Just enough to tack the rifle down.

Step 1 of the firing pose

With the rifle in place I use more glue on top of the rifle (at the butt end) to make an 'arm'.



One of the annoyances of using hot glue are strands of plastic 'hair', created as you pull the gun away from the dot of glue you deposited. I use the same tool for snipping these as I used for snipping the mini-dowels: plastic modeling sprue snips.

For the second rank, I like the idea of using the trail arms pose. Again, tack the rifle to the body with a minimal amount of hot glue.

Add more glue to make the arm and hand.

Don't worry about it being perfect, paint will camouflage it.

Non-metallic tweezers

Because I added the head onto the bodies too early in the process, you may need to use tweezers or a sharp hobby knife to get the rifles on the figure. Better to put the heads on last for this rank because space is tight.

I had to use a few different poses for this rank due to the space being too tight to get all of the rifles at trail. No problem though. Still looks good.

Finally, we put the rifles on the last rank. For this, the heads will need to be on as if the rifles are already attached and they are not perfectly arranged, you will not be able to glue the heads on.

The figure on the left side of the base should get a little more glue so you can paint the arm and hand (as it is exposed).

I use black gesso on all of my wood figures now. It helps fill the pores, so less paint is required, and if you miss a spot with paint, it looks like shadow. It is especially critical you hit the base with the gesso.

No these are not Prussians, they are more Dark Ages troops

Not only does the gesso fill the wood pores, it helps fill in small gaps and helps further glue and strengthen the final figure. I am very liberal with my coating, so it typically takes 30 minutes or so before you can start painting. If you are doing these in batches then by the time you finish with the last the first should be dry and ready to go or close to it.

Next I have to figure out how to make an artillery piece at this scale. Artillery was a problem at the large scale too, but I did finally figure it out, although the piece was big and required a lot of work.

Austro-Prussian War 1866

So I was working on some Dark Ages troops – Sub-Roman Britons (Kingdom of Strathclyde) and Anglo-Saxons when I found a whole batch of painted 15mm Dark Ages troops that I had purchased just before I stopped miniatures gaming three years ago. I packed them away without a second glance.

After I found them again, I had mixed feelings. Great to have troops to use, but it put a damper on my Minimalist Medievals project. Why build a duplicate army?

If you have been reading my posts on my wargaming blog, then you know that I have started going through some of the rules that I have purchased over the years and started trying out the ones that I have never played. (And there are many!) I wanted to try Neil Thomas' Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe 1815–1878 rules, so I started looking for another period to try. I would build an army for that, because I was curious whether these bead armies would work for any period other than ancients and medievals. (Round beads work so well for heads with or without helmets on them.)

One of the periods that has picqued my interest is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, but I have 6mm troops for that (although not enough painted to play an actual game). I finally struck upon doing the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, otherwise known as The Seven Weeks' War. Prussia was trying to unify Germany and wanted to hold more sway over Southern Germany (Bavaria, Hanover, Baden, etc.), but Austria opposed them.

What is interesting about the Age of Rifle wars is how unbalanced the two sides are. Prussian infantry were equipped with breechloading rifles while the Austrians were still using rifled muskets and still believed in going in with the bayonet. Basically Firepower versus Shock tactics. Because of the lack of balance, I would either need to learn to love the Austrians (I hate intentionally giving my opponent the underdog) or commit to playing these solo.

So my first unit was an Austrian infantry unit (one base per unit). It uses the plastic tube beads for the body that I used for horse legs in previous builds. The head on these guys are a round bead. It was really an experiment.

Could I make the round beads look anything at all like a shako? If not, would it at least look acceptable?

Honestly, I like these guys. It may look like they are wearing black fezes, but I still like the look. One thing to note: I painted all of the figures while they were on popsicle sticks, so there is a little more detail on the figures in the back rank. I decided not to paint the locks of hair like I did on my Saxons though.

After seeing Matt's ancients in his last post, I suddenly realized that there were 1/4" screwhole plugs. There were other shapes I could use other than spheres and round tubes! I quickly place an order for button plugs, flathead plugs, and roundhead plugs and started experimenting. (You saw in my last post one of those experiments: tricornes.)

The next unit I painted actually did not use any of these new parts. I realized that the pony beads sort of had a barrel shape. They make really good crusader knight heads with that barrel style closed helm. They also made a good shape for a Hussar busby.

Here is a stand of Austrian Hussars. By then the Hussar units had definitely lost their flair. Their dolmans, atillas (no more pelisses), and trousers were all the same color now, your choice of dark blue or light blue. The busby bags were different colors, but otherwise that was it.

Although I had not been painting saddle blankets or other horse furniture with my other cavalry figures, I thought I might with these, but this was the period where they stopped using them! So no nice, red saddle blankets like the Napoleonic period. I really like these guys though.

When painting the figures I am trying just for basic colors, plus those details that truly stand out. If something is "iconic", it gets painted. For the hussars, it is the busby bags, as they were a different color from the rest of the uniform. Also, because it is visible from above and behind, it will be highly visible to players when the unit is resting on the gaming table.

Finally, I just had to paint some Prussian infantry in their pickelhaube helmets. Again, the idea is to paint the basic colors and only pick out what is iconic. The grey trousers do not stand out, so I did not paint them, keeping the entire lower half of the body blue.

What does stand out on these troops is their white belts (high contrast to the blue coat) and the brass details on the pickelhaube itself. I also decided to paint the collar and cuffs red, and think it was a good choice, as these also really stand out.

The pickelhaube has a small dab of hot glue at the top. I pulled the glue gun away from the head (a button plug) and then blew on the glue to get it to cool and harden. That made the spiky point. I then used scissors to cut the spike down to a reasonable length.

At first I painted a full-blown eagle, which is what the brass plate on the front of the helmet depicts. It was a pain, but I realized it would increase my painting time dramatically and in the end they would not be uniform. I decided to forego it and paint a simple oval. But something still did not look right. I painted the brass trim along the edge of the helmet. Again, time consuming and not very visible. So I painted over that too. Finally it struck me: the brass scales on the chin strap were often tied above the forward peak. By painting these not only would it show something you commonly see in the pictures, but it would emphasize the black area that represented the peak. It actually seemed to make it look like a helmet peak even though it was perfectly round like the rest of the plug's edges.

These guys, of course, took the most time of all, but I think it was worth the effort. Of course, having to paint the other four stands will tell me whether I think it is worth it in the end to paint all that detail.

I will go into the construction of these guys at another time. It may look like it is a button plug on top of a plastic tube bead, but there is more to it. The main difference with these figures is that I constructed and painted them on the base. I intentionally clustered the formation to minimize the amount of painting I would have to do, just as I did with the Saxon shieldwalls. This really does help reduce the time to paint and it forces you to focus on only those areas that can be seen from above and behind or above and in front.

A Tricorne for 12mm Figures

One of my biggest frustrations in making wooden soldiers is that the period I liked the most, the American Revolutionary War, had a rather iconic hat that was very hard to reproduce: the tricorne. I experimented with foam sheet, but it was a lot of work and it only looked "okay". A month or so ago I was trying out these 25mm shaker pegs like Matt uses, and tried a "painting conversion" to make a tricorne. That went from "okay" to "bad".

It was when I saw Matt's pikemen in his last post that I discovered that you could get button plugs, flathead plugs and roundhead plugs small enough to work with the ~12mm figures that I was building. I immediately went to the American Woodcrafters Supply Co. website and bought a bag of each to experiment with. Button plugs make great helmets and can be used for a picklehaube, flathead plugs can be used for a kepi or a shako (depending upon which end is up), and roundhead plus make a for a great grenadier bearskin.

When I got them one of the button plugs fell on the table and rested a certain way, with a stray bit of debris on it, and an idea struck me.

I stroked three pen lines on the plug and all of a sudden I knew I had an easier way of making a three-cornered hat. Just three simple cuts with a hobby knife. The top would still be rounded though. Would it look okay?

After making the cuts – they actually broke a little bit because the pieces are so small and brittle – I took a flat sanding block to the sides and smoothed it out.

It actually did not look half bad. The top was still too round, but I was determined to keep the approach as minimal as possible. What would it look like with paint?

So here is a British infantryman in 1768 Warrant uniform with his tricorne. Basically I painted it all black, edged it in white, then painted some dark gray for the depressed areas, then painted black for shadow. That is about as complex as it gets.

Although this is a bit in shadow, the painting really makes it look like a tricorne, especially when seen on the table. Really easy modification. Still very much in the minimalist style. I like it.

Getting Minimalistic Over the Weekend

Hi Everyone,

I was going to hold off posting my bead warriors since Dale just posted, but he encouraged me to go ahead and post.  Over the weekend I put together three stands of troops.  I will discuss the building process, the painting, and then also my subjective feelings about these little fellows, both good and bad.  In terms of historical miniature gaming, I am one of those people that has one period that I like significantly more than all others.  For me that's ancients, and specifically ancient warfare from about 500 BC to around 100 BC.  Because of this, I am a sucker for Alexander the Great and the Successors battles in particular.  So, not surprisingly, this is the army I started with when doing my first batches of bead warriors. 

Over the weekend, I got three bases done, two phalangite bases and one skirmisher base.  I try and use everything from a craft store or online craft shop, so even the bases are precut ones that I buy online for not much money.  They are about 3 inches wide (just a little shy of that actually), 1.25 inches deep, and 1/4 inch thick.  I wanted thick bases for these little fellows because a) I think it looks cool, and b) while in play I want people handling the bases, not the figures.

They are essentially painted the same as my "28mm" wooden ancients figures I make using spools and such.  So they are way more "meeplish" than Dale's figures in appearance.  Here is a closeup of the phalangites.

And here is what they are made with.

The body is a 5/16" Flat Head plug, and the head is a Maple Button Plug 1/4" in size.  You just glue the mushroom plug on top of the wider end of the flat head plug and that's it.  The pikes are toothpicks with the sharp end cut off of one of them.  The shields are called "brads."  You get them in a craft store in the area that has the paper and scrapbooking stuff.  They are designed to hold pieces of paper together as they have two sharp prongs that you can bend open and then shut again to hold the paper, but I snip those off.  Honestly, this is just a 10-12mm version of the same figures I do at 28mm with spools and mushroom caps, it's just that the mushroom cap is smaller, instead of a spool for the body I used a flat head plug, and the brad I use for the shields is smaller.

To illustrate this, here is a comparison photo of the 28mm phalangites I made years ago, and the new 10/12mm phalangites I made this past weekend.

As far as painting goes, very, very easy.  Dale is right, you can really get lost in painting details that don't matter.  What I tried to do was identify what was the most distinctive thing on the actual soldier and just paint those things.  So for the phalangites, it's obviously the helmet and the linen armor.  The linen armor pattern is just made up, it is just a "suggestion" of the linen armor.  You can't really see it in these pictures but I did paint hands on the back side of the pikes to give the appearance of them holding it, but that's it for details.  Helmet, face and eyes, linen armor, and that's about it for painting details.

For my skirmishers, I wanted to try and give some variety in appearance.  Also, obviously, there are way fewer of these figures on the base, although the base itself is the same size.  Here is what these guys are made from.

All have the same 8mm bead body.  The first one on the left and the third one from the left have the same head, which is a 1/4" round head plug.  I actually bought these thinking I would use them for the hoplite heads when I get around to doing them, but they are too small.  I need one size larger, which I will eventually get.  The second one from the right has a head made from the same mushroom cap as the phalangites, and the one on the far right has a head that is simply a 1/4" round ball.  The bows they are holding are the ends of a tile spacer cut in the horseshoe shape and glued to the body.  Painting was easy, although I thought they looked funny until I put the belts on them

What I like about these little guys:
1.  Inexpensive.  Even me buying "custom" parts instead of just going with the standard beads from a craft store, they are still really cheap to make if you buy the pieces in bulk.

2.  Fast to paint.  Wow, I literally did the bases staggered, so that I was at a different point with the painting of each so that I could be painting one while another one was drying.  For these three bases, with a total of 28 figures, I may have 3 actual hours of work in them, and honestly, a lot of that time was waiting for the glue and paint to dry.

3.  Mass effect.  Just like with all 6mm or 10mm figures, you can get so many of them in a small area on the board it looks really good, even with my cartoony meeple style, they look good when they are put together like in the first picture.

4.  Light.  Especially if you used a thinner wooden base, you would find that each base weighs less than one 28mm metal figure.  Actually, I think even my thicker bases still weigh less.  So for those of us like me that like to run convention games, or run games at a gaming club where you have to transport everything, my old back is very happy to be moving a box of these guys around compared to a box of 28mm metal figures.

What I don't like about these little guys:
1.  Fiddly.  There is no real way around this unless you do what Dale does which is paint them on the base.  I don't do that, and by not doing it they are hard to hold onto when you paint them.  The phalangites are not, you can hold onto the pike, but the skirmishers and the base of Hypaspists I am working on now, it is impossible not to get paint all over your hands.  In the future I might try to use some sort of putty tack to stick them to a base that I can hold onto when painting them.  That should help to solve this problem.  It's always risky with wood, though, because it absorbs everything, so if the tacky stuff is damp at all, the wood will absorb it and possibly alter the paint.  I hope not though.

2.  <Yawn>.  Okay, I admit it, I can be a bit of a painting snob.  Painting these guys this weekend made me feel the same way that painting 6mm figures made me feel when I used to paint them.  <Yawn>  On the good side, it's hard to paint them poorly.  On the bad side, it's very difficult to paint them very well.  This is definitely a double-edged sword characteristic, because if you wanted to put together an army quickly that looks good on the table, but you didn't care if they looked great, just to try out a period that you do not normally game or something like that, they are perfect for that.  But the point of them is to be minimalistic, and simple, and paint just the most important elements of the figure.  That's great for speed, and for identification on the table top, but for those paint snobs like me out there, it can get really boring really quickly because it is very assembly-line like.  So for me, personally, the level of enjoyment in painting them was far less than for the 28mm ancients I have done with the spools, and definitely less than for the 32mm fantasy figures for rpgs I've been doing of late.

Will I keep doing some?  I will.  I want to do an elephant, and I want to do some cavalry.  I will eventually do enough to put on a game.  I like a huge battlefield with lots of troops on it and this will really fit that bill.  Actually, I sort of like knowing that between even just Dale and I, we have 10/12mm army options, 25/28mm army options, and 40mm army options for figures made out of inexpensive and simple craft store parts.  I, personally, think that diversity in scales for these types of figures is just darned cool.

Getting Medieval on the Road

I went to the local Michael's and found a cheap ($3) hot glue gun and said "Why not?" because my experiments with super glue had pretty much failed. Super glue just does not provide a strong enough hold when dealing with curved, plastic pony beads. Pony beads are basically 6 mm x 9 mm plastic beads with a large hole. I use two of these for horses, acting as the body.

To each of these I attach a 3 mm by 5 mm plastic, tubular bead.

Here is what it looks like attached.

I usually fill up the pony bead with hot glue first, then attach the "legs". When attaching  the front and back sets together I connect them with a spot of hot glue and then let the glue harden.

Although hot glue will typically set in 15 to 30 seconds, unless you are using cold water the glue generally takes a few minutes to harden. After it has hardened, I add more hot glue at the join point between the two pony beads, deliberately leaving a blob towards the bottom (above the horse's legs) as this gives the appearance of rider's legs.

As you can also see in the image above, I use a wooden, tubular bead for the horse's head (the light colored bead). All I can say about it is that it comes in a package of wooden beads with varied shapes and sizes that I buy at Hobby Lobby and it is the perfect size. Those five beads complete the horse for a 12 mm figure.

For the rider, I only need two more beads, one for the head and one for the body. Because these figures are sort of Chibi-style, with an oversized head compared to the body size, the rider's head is either an 8 mm round wooden bead or another 6 mm by 9 mm pony bead, depending upon which shape suits your subject better. (The pony bead provides more of a flat-topped barrel shape, while the wooden bead is a spherical shape.) The body is a small "seed" bead. It does not need to be as large as the body used for infantry as the rider's legs overlap the shape of the horse's body and is represented by hot glue.

Here are six cavalry, armed with swords and shields, shown at various angles.

Some cavalry with spears in upraised position.

Some cavalry with spears in lowered position (charging). All of these cavalry use pony beads for the heads, so will be better for medieval knights with barrel helmets, although the shields are not really the right shape for heater shields. But that is okay. I am trying to train myself that it will be the paint job and not the shape that will matter as much.

So far I have finished six sword-armed cavalry and 12 spear/lance-armed cavalry, plus 16 infantry in shield wall formation. So let's look at the infantry.

For these guys I used two beads, an 8 mm wooden sphere bead and a 6 mm wooden cube bead, hot glued one on top of the other. (The cube is the body.) To that I glue a piece of foam sheet cut out with a hole punch, which represents a shield and part of a wooden round toothpick to represent the spear. I only put the shield on the front row figures and the single back row figure where the shield would show.

As you can see in this image from above, adding shields to all of the figures in the back row is not necessary as they would never show, unless you created a sufficient gap between the two ranks. But if you did that, then you would be able to see the fronts of the second rank sufficiently that you would then have to paint it. That defeats the point of this minimalist style.

Once I paint these all up with black gesso a lot of the little holes and gaps will be filled up, in addition to acting as shadow for any area I cannot or do not paint.

I hope to have another three or four infantry shield wall units done in the upcoming week. I have to work on these at night, if only to stop me from buying more stuff at the local craft stores. I have no more room in my luggage! (Update: I got three infantry and five cavalry stands done.)

Here is the first infantry unit that I have finished. I have painted it all in black gesso in order to create shadows for wherever I cannot paint another color. I will only paint those areas of the figures that are easily seen. Hard to see places will be kept black. This unit will likely be an Anglo-Saxon fyrd unit. No armor, a couple of helmets (mostly caps), and lots of colors. In terms of Dux Bellorum, it will be an Ordinary Shieldwall unit.

As this unit is more orderly, it will be an Anglo-Saxon select fyrd unit. They will have body armor and metal helmets. In terms of Dux Bellorum they will be Noble Shieldwall units.



Here is another Anglo-Saxon fyrd units (Ordinary Shieldwall), painted up. As you can see in the images above, lots of color in the clothing (the square bead) and in the hair color, caps, and helmets.

The main point of emphasis to the eye, however, is the head from the back and the spear points, shields, and heads from the front. Lots of detail on the clothing or shield is wasted. I allowed myself some dots, stripes, and spirals for the shields, but I was not going to paint any animals or Celtic knots, that is for sure!

Opposing the Anglo-Saxons I wanted to use the Sub-Roman Britons. At first I thought about using the SRB in the Southwest of England, but later realized that the Kingdom of Strathclyde lasted much longer and had more enemies it could fight (lasting until the 10th century or so). Plus, they can be an all-cavalry force, if you want them to be! I thought that would be fun – cavalry and light, skirmishing infantry against a shieldwall – so I decided to make a few cavalry units.

This first one is sword-armed, just so it can be a little different from the rest. It will likely end up as the General's stand, or in Dux Bellorum, the Noble Companion Riders.

Here is a unit of Strathclyde cavalry. I will paint them with a few helmets and no body armor, making them Ordinary Riders for Dux Bellorum. They are armed with javelins and spears.



This Strathclyde unit has everyone wearing metal body armor and helmets, no count as Noble Riders. The weaponry are javelins and spears, so they will use their firepower to wear down the enemy before charging into them and breaking them. That is the plan at least.

As you can see, I really did not put a lot of effort into the shields. (I also forgot to paint the spear points!) The good thing is, I can always go back and paint a little more if the mood strikes me. The ones that have shields on the outer edge of the stand (the red one, in this case) and are easily accessible (the white one and possibly the orange one) would be the likeliest candidates. Maybe a simple two color scheme with painted halves, stripes, or dots. Plus iron shield bosses in the center.

So, all in all a pretty productive trip. I still have three more cavalry units to add weapons and shields to, but the horses and riders are all done. I stopped doing infantry because I was worried that they would not survive the trip. As all of the infantry in a unit were glued together in one big block, that made them less flexible. So I glued a couple of dozen heads to bodies and left it at that.

It is all coming together nicely. If the Dux Bellorum rules do not work out, there is always DBA (with 3" bases!) and several other rules I would like to try (like Conquerors and Kings).

More Painting & Latest Craft Store Find

Hi Everyone,

Thought I would post a few more painting shots. 

These are the base coats with the eyes for three figures, one of which, the orc shaman, you've already seen.  The one on the left is an evil wizard/necromancer and the one on the right is a warrior priest summoning some magic effect ... or signaling for a touchdown, whichever you prefer.

The Wizard has the standard cloak I usually do but I wanted him to have a metal skull cap on his head, similar to the one worn by Merlin in the classic Excalibur movie from the 80's.  These are all base colors and you can see that for all of them, I chose to do a black eye base.

Here is the finished evil wizard.  The eyes are done by just putting two white dots into the large black oval.  The cloak is the dark brown color I like so much as a base tone, but in this case because his cloak is so dark I painted the base coat black, and used the dark brown (the "Soft Black" color) to fill in as the color of his cloak.  This is a good example on a human figure the technique of leaving some of the darker undercoat color showing through when you use a lighter tone over top of it.  It is done on every part of the miniature except for his face.

Here is another angle.

Finally, here is the evil warrior priest finished.

He is pretty straightforward except for his eyes.  I wanted him to appear to be looking up, so I used the same technique for the eyes that I use on the zombies.  The white part is not just two dots but a crescent shape so that it looks like his pupils are all the way up in the top of his eye, which they would be if he was looking up to the sky summoning the power of his god.

Here is another angle.

The mace on his belt is just cut from a tile spacer.

Finally, Michael's, at least the ones where I live, are carrying a new line of wooden craft parts that have different "wooden people."  I've not seen these before.  Also, they have this pack that has a male and female wooden person, a hut, and a tree.  Unfortunately it is about $4 and I would never use the hut for anything I don't think, but I really like the tree.  I took this picture at the store and it didn't turn out as good as I hoped, but you can see the people and the tree okay in it.  These people are a nice size and if I was starting over or wanting to do a really large army, I might opt to use these.

The hut looks like an ice cream cone, but the tree (which is next to it but is upside down) is actually very nice, this picture does not do it justice.  You can see one of the "pawns" or "wooden people" in the upper left of the package.  Unfortunately, I don't think you can but the trees in a pack by themselves (like a four pack or something).  I only saw the trees included in this package, and it is cost prohibitive to pay that much just for one tree for me, anyway.  But it is a very nice tree.

-- Matt