I’ve finally finished a long run of toy work and have time to get back to the Fox WWII minis and, with John Kellner’s help, bringing out some of the figures I made a while ago. These are to include two wolves, three human (Byzantine) infantry a wood elf noble in traveling clothes and a goblin captain.
Here are some shots of a second wolf I had done a while back but had not taken pictures of.
Now a bit about proportions.
There is a lot of discussion about realism in miniatures particularly with respect to proportions and anatomy. From what seems to pass for good or realistic I get the impression actual anatomy and proportion is little known or generally misconceived. I’ve spent some time researching the subject over the years so I thought I’d set down what I’ve learned.
People are obviously not standardized industrial products, they vary but they do not vary in a completely random way, nor are variations or degrees of variation equally common. Adult male humans can be anything from two to nine feet tall but only one in forty European males are shorter than 5’4" or taller than 6’4" with 7 out of 10 being 5’7" to 6’1". Likewise the relations of the parts of the body to one another, the size of hands varies from about three to five inches across the knuckles but large hands almost always belong to large people, small hands to small ones. Variations do not occur independently but as a cluster of ‘normal’ related proportions. An important example is, modern European males are about 7.5 times the height of their head tall on average, that is to say 80% of them are 7.25 to 7.75 and less than one in a thousand adult males has a head larger than 6.5 or smaller than 8.25. Women tend to have very slightly proportionally larger heads. Old photographs seem to show people in the 19th century were shorter than moderns but their heads were the same size, that is the long bones of the legs and arms were shorter so the average head to body ratio moves to about 7 heads for men.
Small scale gaming figures (less than 54mm) even the ones praised for their realistic proportions are 4.5 to 5.5 heads or occasionally 6, which are the normal proportions of a child (see figure 1). The exception is many 1/72, 1/76 plastic figures.
The face has normal proportions as well. The eyes of an adult male are generally slightly higher on the face than a child or a female. The center point being between the pupil and the lower lid of the eye on average. Eyes higher or lower than this by even a few millimeters begin to look odd, move the eye more than a half inch either way and you are outside the range where 99% of adults fall. The relatively restricted position of the eye near the middle of the head is one reason why measuring figures -"to the eyes because if the figure is wearing a hat or helmet you can’t tell where the top of the head is" - makes no sense. If you can see the eyes you know how much taller the figure is within an inch to scale (assuming the figure is not grossly distorted, see below), on a 30mm figure that’s less than half a millimeter.
Again small scale gaming figures, even those praised for their realism tend to have absurdly low foreheads and oversized features. I expect this is probably to allow the sculptor to fit more detail on a smaller figure, essentially what’s being done is squeezing facial features which would be realistic for a 54mm figure on a 30mm one (figure 2).
Finally there is the difference between male and female faces from a sculptural perspective. Stripped of makeup the differences between the male and the female face is very slight, though our perception is attuned to it so it seems greater. Women have slightly less prominent brows, more delicate jaw and very slightly fuller lips, smaller ears and nose on average. Having said that there is an overlap, men with faces that look feminine and women with masculine faces. I suspect most males are so used to seeing females in makeup they would think just from the unpainted face half women were males without cosmetics. (figure 3).
Small figures generally overcome this difficulty by making female faces into cartoons with absurdly fine jaws, tiny nose, huge lips, in other words a barbie-doll face. This makes miniature female faces very much alike as there isn’t much room for variation in such a formula.
Next time, women’s legs (and arms).
