Knight Part 10

Having wrapped up the White Speaker project, I spent some time trying to get the knight finished up too.  I'm not quite there, but he's getting very close.  This weekend I spend time working on his base.  I'm picturing him somewhere in Outremer, so I went with a rather dry looking base without much plant life.  I put a bit of dried grass in among the stones, but I still need to clean it up a bit and then use some washes or pigments to give it some color variation and tie it into the base.

There are a few other details I need to wrap up.  One of them is the arrows.  I planned to have two stuck in the ground and another two on his shield.  I figure for the arrows in the shield, he would have snapped those off, so they will just be stubs with the other half lying on the ground near his feet.  So this brings us to the question of how do I make miniature arrows?  Well, I'd already found some brass rod at about the right thickness.  But I still needed to make the fletching, the feathers on the arrows.  For this I remembered reading an article over on MassiveVoodoo about using real feathers on miniatures.  Turns out it was authored by Matt DiPietro.  In it one of the applications is feathers for arrows.  I mostly followed that tutorial, though I made a few minor changes.

To start, I got a bag of feathers from a local arts and crafts store.  Now, in Matt's approach, he clips off a section of the feathers shaft and glues that to the arrow.  I just clipped a portion of the outer section and was careful to hold it together while attaching it to the arrow (first image below).  To attach, I took the end of the brass rod and rolled it in glue.  Then I carefully placed it against the edge of the feather section I'd clipped off (second image below).  These pieces are intentionally too large so it'd be easier to hold them.  Once they dried, I went in with a small scissors and clipped them down to size (third image below).

The process requires some finesse.  I managed to screw it up a couple times.  But, easy to just scrape the feather off the arrow and clip a new section.  Take your time and be gentle as you clip the feather ends down to size.  So far I've got the one down and another half finished.  I still need to do the two ends from the shield, but I'm getting a better handle on this as I do more and more of them.  Once those are complete, I'll go in and paint the shafts.