Sunday 6 January 2013

Russian clay toy soldiers for wargaming

There seems to be a thing in Russia for making toy soldiers out of modelling clay I don't know if they are soft like Plasticine or they harden like FIMO but I am in awe of the patience and dexterity of the people who make them.  The sort of thing I'm talking about can be seen on this website showing a wargame of the Battle of Wachau 1813 with 45mm figures, or in this magazine article about the collection of Sergey Kiselev who sculpted his 30mm wargame figures over a period of 31 years (the photos belie their size until you see them standing next to a zippo lighter). 

Links to these sites have featured on various blogs and Yahoo Groups before but I don't recall where or when so if I should have given credit to someone else for finding them in the first place my apologies but I can't remember who you were.  Anyway my reason for bringing this subject up is that I came across this video by accident, enjoyed it and felt I should share it with a wider audience.

As I am still a bit of a blog virgin it is also an experiment to see if I can add videos to this site.  Posts here have been sparse lately as I have been on a bit of an end of year creativity bender, doing lots of conversions and painting, when you feel the urge you have to follow it before it all wears off. 

Oh yes........... a Happy New Year to all, now enjoy the film.


All I can say is they must have some awful long hard winters in Russia!

5 comments:

  1. Very interesting video - the man is a genius !

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  2. It's a pity I don't speak a word of Russian...I particularly like the horses, very expresive. What amazing is that he seems to use little or no wire armature work? Also he seems to have trays of spares, so presumably it's re-workable with... ? ...immersion in hot water? Also interesting to note that a lot of his files are in English!!

    H

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  3. Happy New Year.
    Gosh quite an undertaking,amazing what people do.
    best wishes
    Alan

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  4. Very nice post, thank you for sharing!
    I love the plasticine soldiers of S.Kiselev and N.Semibratov. Their work inspired me to start to make my own soldiers with FIMO.
    Regards, Cesar.

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  5. Peter Shulman's War. Our Russian friend is not alone.

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