Sculpting My First 28mm Civil War Casualty

    

    Something that the folks close to me know is that I really love collecting and gaming with casualty tokens, especially for historical games. Since I’m actively working on my Civil War ruleset, "Vortex of Hell", while writing this, I’m deep into ACW territory as far as minis go right now. I painted about 140 individual Civil War minis earlier this month for the first play test (Here) of my new game with some friends, and needed to take a little break from painting piles of tiny dudes for a few weeks before getting back into it. So what better way could I spend an hour and a half than sculpting a dead guy?

    First, I should mention that I’m an historian and the American Civil War is one of the topics I’ve been studying for decades now. With that, the famous photos of casualties taken by Mathew Brady’s team, Alexander Gardner, and others are seared into my mind. Those photos showed the American pubic for the first time what war really looked like. It wasn’t soldiers dying bravely with loved ones near their side comforting them, but instead ghoulish bloated twisted bodies set in inhuman poses, their faces frozen in painful expressions. Even though this blog and the hobby in general is about toy soldiers, I always remind myself that these photos, and now tiny sculptures, are of real people. People who ate birthday cake, had dreams, crushes, and who's lives were cut incredibly short due to this war. So I always try to treat projects like this with some reverence, even if it is a stupid little toy soldier. 

    With this in mind, I wanted to start my casualty sculpting journey with those photos as a reference. Also it's worth noting, there are some fantastic casualty sculpts that I think already fit this bill from Sash and Saber and a few other companies, but I believe you can never have enough variation. Anyway, let’s kick off the rust and start sculpting! 

    I used a 50/50 mix of green stuff and milliput, which is what I have been sculpting with for a while now. It’s the best of both worlds. I first started with the legs. I used an S&S casualty and an older “Old Glory” casualty model for scale so they weren’t too long. I always end up going too big when I sculpt and needing to hack off bits as I work. 

    The legs started as tubes, and the torso started as a ball. I sculpted simple creases into the pant legs, then moved to creating the jacket front. The jacket is kind of a Richmond Depot jacket or a federal state jacket, so this guy can be painted as either side. The buttons are arguable too large, but I was having a problem with scale for them at this tiny of a size. This should be a 9 button front, but there are 6 visible, so next time I'll spent more time on this part. I definitely need to work on that. 

    Next I sculpted the waistbelt, cap box, and cartridge box. Those were all simple enough. I sculpted the waistbelt open, as there are many primary accounts of wounded men opening their belts, jackets, and trousers looking for their wounds before bleeding out. Each arm started as a tube and was simply shaped into place and molded onto the torso. I pressed in the seam of the sleeve caps as well. Next were the hands. There's really nothing special there, just balled up fists with the hint of fingers pressed in. Then the feet were sculpted into a semblance of Civil War "booties" or brogans.

    The most anxiety driving part of this was the face. Sculpting faces is always tough for me, which is probably why I usually sculpt monsters and mutants. But, I think this face turned out ok for a potentially bloated dead body. I started with a ball of putty, stabbed a basic mouth and eye sockets into it, then nostrils. Then I sculpted the nose a bit, and put two plastic beads for eyes. Then the worst part is four individual eyelids which are blended into the face. I added a "tongue" into the mouth as well. The hair was added last, and was just clumps of green stuff mashed into messy curly hair. Somewhere in here I added the jacket collar as well. 

    Last, I did a little clean up on various bits, and added a haversack strap for another layer and detail to the finished mini. I should add, this entire thing was sculpted on the plastic of an old blister pack, so the pics were of course very tough to make look good after the fact. 

    Here are some shots after he finished drying. It definitely isn't perfect by any means, but I think it was a worthwhile project to get me back into sculpting at this scale. Hopefully I'll have enough creative juice left to do a full set of these guys and maybe possibly cast them. We'll see!