Wee Free Men

A shadow passed overhead. A buzzard was diving down from the sky towards the Nac Mac Feegle… The bird curved up at the bottom of its dive and as it climbed again a dot dropped from it. As it fell it seemed to grow two wings and start to spin like a sycamore bract, which slowed down the fall somewhat. It was a pictsie, still spinning madly when he hit the turf a few feet away, where he fell over. He got up, swearing loudly, and fell over again. The swearing continued. (Pg 112)

Morag and Hamish were one of the first elements that slipped into place when I was thinking about the army. The goblin list provided the perfect proxy in the Winggit.

Morag is a common buzzard but funnily enough there isn’t a big call for buzzard models. Thankfully in a past life I worked in retail and knew that the wide world of plastic animals would be my friend here. 

The size and pose would be the important things to get as close to scale as I could. After some failed attempts, I managed to find this:

• One of the nekkid feegles was chosen to be Hamish mostly because of the pose of his legs. Drilling his wee hands for the rope was a pain in the buzzard.
• The rope was made by winding thin florists wire in a drill. I could have done with making it a little tighter as I didn’t realise how much bending it to fit would begin to separate the threads again but overall, it is an excellent trick to get scale rope quickly.
• At the very end of the book, Hamish adopts a parachute made out of Tiffany’s underwear which were sculpted out of a green stuff/Milliput mix. I needed a little superglue to get them to stick to the toy plastic.
• Painting was a mix of Contrast paints and normal acrylics. Again the goal was the idea of the thing rather than an exact copy so while I used reference photos, including for the rosebud pattern fabric, I wasn’t slavish about it.
• The flight stand is 3mm clear acrylic rod from eBay. It is long enough to go right through the foam on the base to go through the mdf biscuit at the bottom. 

Looking back on the original model, I realise I’ve basically painted it the same as it originally was but hey-ho, she’s a buzzard now.