WIP: 60mm WWII Marine for Cunnyngham Collectibles

I have been enjoying sharing some of my work in progress with the Hulk vs Wolverine sculpt and I am excited to have the chance to show you another work in progress series.  One thing that many people ask me is why I don't show WIP.  The reason is that I take NDA's seriously.  While I rarely sign them, I assume that my clients don't want their work shown before they get it up on their site.

In the case of the Hulk, I have permission to use it as a work in progress series on my blog and I also obtained permission from, Cunnyngham Collectibles, to do a WIP series on this model. If you know me, you already know that I am a huge WWII and Military History fan and buff.  I have bookshelves, upon bookshelves, of reference material for military history and I always enjoy getting more books on the subject.

When I was given this project, I jumped at the chance to do it.  I love when I get WWII on my desk and having a larger size made it all the more exciting.  Since this figure is quite a ways, I thought I would do the WIP taking you through everything from start to where I am now.

The very first thing that I do when I get a new piece is to research and gather reference. I sent the reference to Beau and then we discussed the pose and other details.  Here is the reference that I gathered for this figure.

Once everything was agreed upon, I started posing out the armature for the piece. Again, it was photographed and sent to Beau for approval so I could make sure the posing on it was approved.  Scale is also checked beside one of Beau's other figures.

As I have mentioned in the Hulk vs Wolverine WIP, I always bulk out the armature so the figure has a nice 3D shape to it that is in the right proportions.  Again, I will add as needed when I do the top layer.  These photos show it half and half.  I bulked it out underneath and then I added the pant details, you can see the underpinning in the top half.

You may notice missing pockets and a pocket outline, those are details that I will fill in later.

After this stage, I started adding the pockets and sculpted on the coat.  At every stage, I am sending these to Beau for approval.  10 points to the first person who can spot the mistake that I made.  Actually, neither Beau nor myself had noticed and it was a person on his blog who pointed it out.

So...we realized that I was actually sculpting the wrong pants.  During that time, pockets were seen on late war uniforms but they were rarely issued.  Our pants should not have any pockets and I was using conflicting reference, which is actually easy to do with military subject matter.

With that realization, I had to go back and fix my mistakes and the end result was this.

Because the pockets affect the flow of the fabric, I had to cut off and resculpt the whole area, including his backside to fix my mistake.  I am still not 100% happy with his butt area, which I told Beau, so I will be making some adjustments to the piece as I finish it up.

And the final photos are his face.  To research the expression as he aims down the sight, I grabbed a Nerf gun and practiced looking down the sight to be sure I had the expression right.  I know, hi-tech.  :)  The face was a lot of fun, more so than I am used to.  With such a large area to work with, you can really get the finer details in the expression.

So, if you have any questions or comments, just post in the comment section and I will answer them.  I do recommend that you check out Beau's company, http://cunnyngham.com.