Imperial Knights, Part VII

So, it only took a little bit of work, but I managed to salvage and rebuild the toes  without losing too much time.  They're much more solid this way.  Now on to the legs.

They look complex on the template, but the leg sections are really the same sort of thing I’ve done in the past for gun barrels and towers and such.  They’re just octagonal cylinders.  The only difference is these ones have tabs and folds at each end for the hips, knees, and ankles to rest in and attach to.  Cutting them out is a bit of work, but once that’d done they go together very easily.

Helpful Hint –Cut the vertical tab (the one that runs the length of the thigh), a little thicker than it’s marked on the template.  There’s a lot of stress on that tab.  I’d give it all the room I can to grab hold with.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that you might not want to peel the template off the calf-section of the leg.  Some of those squares and rectangles are going to be helpful in the near future.  It’s not a huge problem if you already peeled it—you can just look at it on your computer. 

The hip and the knee are two simple cylinders.  I cut them out and then wrapped them around the shaft of my hobby knife to give the cardstock a good curve.  Then it came down to another bit of pinching and holding each one for about ten minutes.

Another little note.  The outside of the hip is a very nice piece that would give me a beveled edge on that cylinder-joint.  However, I made a pre-emptive decision not to use it.  As I’ve mentioned a few times before, this template is really designed around paper as a building material, not cardstock.  While that piece may look beautiful in paper, I think cardstock’s going to be too rigid, which means there’s a good chance it’ll be creased or wrinkled, plus it’ll be pulling itself apart as the cardstock tries to revert to its natural flatness.  And this will all be happening on the outside of one of the major, load-bearing joints in the Knight.  Instead I used a simple disc and made some more detail bits with my hole punches.

This gave me the whole assembly for one leg.  It also made it clear that there was some room for posing the Knight.  Not a huge amount of leeway, but the hips and ankle have some definite room for adjustment.  And small shifts in angle or direction can make a huge change in a model.  So I started thinking about how I could pose the legs.

Some of you may have noticed last time that the ankle isn’t a straight up and down arrangement.  This threw me for a bit until I realized that the model is built with kind of a splayed-leg stance, with its feet further out than its hips.  This is very true to the old Epic-scale Knight, but also feels a bit static compared to the more dynamic pose of the current GW model.

I decided to turn these ninety degrees to make a forward and backwards foot, as if we’ve caught the Knight in mid-stride.  I think this is going to work, but it’s going to take a bit of effort to make it all fit just right. 

And I’ll go into how I did that next time.

Yeah, I know.  It looks like it's going to have little chicken legs.  Don't worry...