Thanks a lot guys (and girls?). I really feel honoured to have won this competition, all the more so since it was really tough this time. Many very nice entries, popular topics like WWII and Napoleonics. In the final round I could not have told which one was better from a technical point of view, because the two entries were so very different, so I was sure the more popular topic would prevail - but as you see, tanks are not always winning the battle, not even against flails.
So congrats to all participants, I think this is a really great idea of Benno's, the comps can push us all to develop new ideas and modelling standards, and yes, to try our hands at a subject matter we perhaps never did before.
Thomas is right, this was my very first effort to model 1/72nd scale figures completely from scratch. I wanted to do a small diorama of the German Peasant War of 1525, and having a specific scene in mind there were practically no figures to start from, so I had to scratch them. I wanted to do a scene from the Battle of Frankenhausen, on 15 May 1525, where a host of approximately 6000 peasants were utterly defeated by ca. 2000 landsknechts. Well, the peasants hardly ever won against professional soldiers, and Frankenhausen too was more of a huge massacre than a battle. I did not want to represent the carnage but the situation immediately before the landsknecht artillery opened fire, with the peasants listening to the last harangue of Thomas Müntzer, the radical priest and peasant leader. My peasants should represent different states of mind, some showing enthusiasm, some in a rather apprehensive mood.
First step for me is always doing research, being a professional historian this is arguably the most enjoyable part of figure and diorama making for me. Here is one of the contemporary illustrations my central figurines are based upon (an illustration by Beham). Some peasants even aquired armour and weapons, and also a few professional soldiers were supposedly hired be the peasants to fight for them. So I decided to show Thomas Müntzer's standardbearer in landsknecht apparel.
Next step was to develop an idea as to how my peasants should be posed and how they should interact. The idea was that Müntzer himself would not be shown, his audience focussing on some point outside of the diorama. That is a way of telling a story without showing the main point of interest, leaving that to the imagination of the viewer.
The figures started as wire sceletons. I also used small pieces of toothpricks for the width of the shoulders and the pelvis. The balance was then modelled using MS. I later redid the faces with GS, since I was not satisfied with the first results.
Here is my favorite figure. Village musicians often came from the poorest population, so I decided to show my piper barefoot and in ragged clothes.
Here is another shot of the finished diorama. It is rather small, 6 cm x 6 cm. I included an execution wheel as a memento mori, these could be seen outside many towns in those times, and you often see them on contemporary landscape paintings.
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