Neil - Take a seat. Lots of tricky bits - acres of flesh, body paint, possibly stripy trousers.
He's ready to go:
There was quite a lot of cleaning up required, especially the heavy mould lines on either side of the body. The rings where the arms join the torso were very delicate, and as they were partially damaged by their proximity to the casting blocks, I decided to remove them and add new ones made from plastic wire insulation. The suspension straps for the scabbard were also too delicate to survive cutting from the casting armatures, so again I made new ones from wire and metal foil.
As for the sculpt, he bears a striking resemblance to Vercingetorix as depicted on this Roman commemorative coin:
Julius Caesar describes the Celts (Gauls) as going into battle with their entire bodies shaved except for their heads and upper lips, where they grew long moustaches. It was also known that they stiffened their hair into spikes, as shown on the coin. Caesar also mentions that they painted their bodies with woad, which is usually interpreted as meaning something like this:
I personally doubt that there would have been enough skilled artists around to paint whole armies with such intricate designs and imagine that the use of woad was more slap-dash, like this:
The trouble is, that if I did the looser style on this figure it would just look amateurish, so I think I'll try something between the two.
