A really intensive effort, especially for my eyes, allowed me to conclude the sculpting of a reasonably decent infantry contingent, for the protection of your beachheads, the storming of enemy camps and the assult of its ports and cities. Here are the guys!
As you can see it's a single 2mm block around 5cm long and less than 1cm in depth. This is actually a resin copy and it does not look very good, you can see the shields slurring down... The original master sculpt, in its green naked glory, is much crispier: you can clearly see the definition of the shields.
As explained in the previous post on the land dimension, I aimed to represent half of an hoplite infantry lochos of about 300 hoplites with a single 2mm sculpt. This guys here are 37 shields in 4 rows (you can count them!). They are actually almost 3mm high, I suffered a little scale creep, but still.. this will allow me to use two sculpts, one behind the other, to table a genuine, 1 to 1 full lochos. I will play Hoplomachia in 1 to 1!
This is it compared to an Irregular miniatures 2mm:
The process was quite a pain in the @$$. As you have seen in the previous post,the first test in supersculpey was ok sizewise and in good formation, but looked like a brick. I tried with greenstuff which gave me a much better organic look, but difficult to shape into the correct formation.
I went for a combination of the two. First I scupted a supersculpey brick of the correct shape and dimension, and cured it by cooking. Then I covered it with a very thin layer of greenstuff, doing a boxlike design in the above dimension and sculpting the bodies on the sides.
The sides came out quite well. You need to draw two vertical lines to delimitate the space taken by each "figure". Then with a little pointy tool you draw a vertical line from the bottom of each "figure", between the "feet", up to around half the "figure": this will give the impression of a body with legs. Then you use the little pointy tool to - very slightly! - press from one side of a "figure" towards the other, at about mid-height. This will create a little recess above the "hips", which will increase the impression of it being a human body.
Then, the FUN part starts... You need details! Heads, especially. You roll a very thin roll of greenstuff, like a half-spaghetti thin (1). It will take several mistakes before you are able to judge the size properly, I swear. You then cut a little piece of it and place it along the block, covering one full rank, from the front man to all those straight behind it (2). You then take away the excess greenstuff in front of the first rank and after the last, and practice 3 horizontal cuts to separate each rank. You now have 4 little squares (3) which, by using you tiny tools and a lot of swearing, you will try to turn into 4 little circles, more or less (4).
There you go! Almost done!
You need some aspides, do you not...? You just take some little nuggets of greenstuff, and I mean reeeally little - you almost are not able to catch them. You roll them round and place them in front of your guys.
Then very carefully you squash them with you little spatula, and they become round. Congratulations! You are crazy!