MiniArt Netherlands Musketeer

Mrs Kinch and I are recently returned from a holiday in the country. It was wonderful, we saw absolutely nothing of the country beyond the four walls of the cottage. Mainly we sat in silence in the same room, read a succession of books, listened to music and drank, ate and slept when the mood took us.  There were cats of course, though not a patch on our own. However in between reading At Swim Two Birds, Hobson Jobson and Edouard De Pomiane - I did some writing and did a spot of modelling just for fun.

I have some very expensive resin kits of 120mm figures that I picked up over the years, but that I simply haven't done anything with, mainly for fear of spoiling them. So I decided on a whim to get a kit that would be completely impractical, that I couldn't use for wargaming and that would just be for the pleasure of the thing.

Drying fitting hands and musket

I ended up buying this fine fellow, a 17th century musketeer by MiniArt. At €15, he was a damn sight cheaper then resin (not that I have ever paid full price for a resin figure) and disposeable enough that I could trust myself not to bottle it and put him back in the box half done. Having painted two large scale figures at this stage, I decided that I would assemble him in parts and paint as I went.

My musketeer without his hands and other additional

 pieces that will have to be added with thread

"And then I told him to put Tab A into Slot B"

"That's what your mother said!"

MiniArt are a Ukrainrian and I haven't put any of their output together before. There are two points that bear mentioning, the Ukrainians are simple folk, direct and forthright in the dealings. They have no need of instructions, which are for decadent fellows who cannot hold their vodka. Consequently the figure comes with one sheet showing all the parts, but nothing by way of instructions as they are generally understood. This is I suppose, a step up from resin figures which frequently come with no instructions at all, but it did give me pause at first.

Secondly, the fit of some of the pieces is not all that could be wished. There are some significant gaps and I'll have to do a spot of filling. Shamefully, I didn't have any green stuff with me while I was on holiday. So I tried originally to do with this with bits of sprue chopped small and disolved in poly cement, but the result was an evil smelling mixture that was too lumpy to be used and that provoked stern looks from wife and cats.

Pay attention to the rapier and it's damned quillons,

 much bad language was expended on those quillions

But it must be said that despite the lack of hand holding and the gapping, the kit went together relatively well. I quite pleased with result so far and while it's a far cry from soldering irons and banana oil, I did feel albeit briefly like a proper modeller for a change. Normally when I've put figures like this together they have been as a gift for someone else, but I think I'll hold onto this chap.

Still much work to be done

Puzzling out how to put the fellow together and shaving the differant bits was fun. The figures himself is a Dutch musketeer from the time of the Dutch revolt. I don't know much about the period, just what little I've picked up from the Alatriste novels and my recent reading of CV Wedgewood.

Twelve Apostles - looking rather more wooden 

then when they crashed that wedding at Cana

I've always rather liked Velasquez's "The Surrender of Breda", though I don't know enough about the
period to date my musketeer before or after. He lacks the "Twelve Apostles" (twelve rounds of ammunition kept in wooden tubes) that I thought most marksmen of the day carried. Whether this puts him at the beginning or middle of the century, I don't know.

While I was putting this chap rogether, I listened to some of GA Henty's "With Pike & Dike" , which is about the Dutch revolt, though Mrs Kinch did make an unkind comment about that a book about a lesbian angler would have been more interesting. 

More gaps

We shall see if this stuff works. I haven't tried it yet as I've been busy since we came home, but rest assured, when I find out, you'll read all about it.


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