Well this was something different to say the least!
I was asked to sculpt a quasi-historical Holt tractor. The type of thing crawling around towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Originally these were for agricultural use but were pressing into military service, at least the slightly larger variants were.
This one is to be used to haul around artillery in it’s unarmored state, but has an optional armored cab with small-calibre gun. It’s a bit of a hybrid actually, I don’t believe the smaller versions had a front wheel to aid with steering, but it was asked for so there it is.
It was a challenge to sculpt. I had certainly never done anything like this before, and to be honest I don’t think greenstuff lends its self very well to hard-edged things like this. Precise, sharp angles are required and the only way to get them with this medium (at least for me) was to do a lot of sanding. To make it a little more interesting I wanted to do it with an exposed engine. Do I know anything about engines? Nah. Pretty much just made it up. I definitely was not going to do two sets of tracks so I just did one that could be duplicated on both sides. That meant simplifying the actual track so there was no ‘direction’ to it.
And all those rivets! Ugh! I wondered how best to do them (actually, how quickest to do them…) and decided upon drilling holes, inserting wire and filing them down. Bit of a pain, and not always very straight!
I don’t think the end result was entirely satisfactory as I never heard back from the client after I sent it off. Oh well. It did take longer than expected, but it was a fun learning experience. I’ll leave vehicles to others in the future, at least for now.
Silurian Games 