For the last 25 years or so, the wider miniatures industry has been turning more and more towards injection moulded plastic as it's material of choice. Games Workshop certainly spring to mind but the last few years have seen a number of others entering the fray whether it be other fantasy manufacturers such as Mantic or the many historical setups such as Perry Miniatures and Warlord. The general way of doing things is to produce plastics for your core range and supplement with metal. Certainly makes sense for reasons I'm not going to detail today, but most of you are probably perfectly aware of.
Well, the last 25 years of plastics development has been seemingly driven by one overriding idea. How close can we get to metal quality in a plastic kit. It started out 'not very' and has inched forward over the years with plastic kits becoming ever more like metal models. At least up to a point. The quality of cutting edge plastics has been leaping forward these last few years and it's reached a point where I kind of feel that plastic models are superior in most ways to metal. Yes, there's the undercuts issue (promise to do an explanatory article about that sometime) but modern plastic sculptors are learning many ways to minimalise this to greater and greater effect. Frankly, plastics are no longer the poor cousin and metals are more an alternative than a superior option. You know there's still a style difference between your typical plastic and your typical metal figure. And something rather interesting seems to be happening. It crystalised to me upon seeing a certain miniature, as mentioned earlier. And here it is...
This is Wurrzag the Savage Orc Shaman. I'm rather fond of this figure. The curious thing seems to be in the style in which it's sculpted. Wurrzag is a metal miniature but appears to be very much designed to look like a plastic one. All that near-machined perfection in it's lines and the blank, crisp surfaces where before you would have had wild textures (take the feathers as a great example). Now, it's not gone to the point of not having undercuts, that'd be a silly thing to do as you'll want to take advantage of your casting medium but still it's very much in line with the plastic style and this makes sense to me. Plastic has it's strengths in it's ability to produce very fine detail in one plane but has very rigid limitations that can't really be worked around (undercuts due to steel moulds). The obvious solution towards having a cohesive range of miniatures is to stop trying to make your plastics look like metals and have your metals look like plastics. If it gives us lovely, paintable figures like this then I'm all for it. Looking back I see it a great deal in Seb Perbet's metal Skaven too.
So, a move towards metals emulating the plastic look or am I just mad? It's entirely possible that it's the latter and it wouldn't be the first time I was seeing patterns in things that weren't there but a curious situation regardless...
0 Yorumlar