I’m going to make you into a princess! Cosmetic surgery for plastic soldiers

From High Priest to Princess / Queen in a few easy steps …

One of the challenges of toy soldiers made for modellers and not gamers is the “too many chiefs” problem.

The Chintoys 54mm Mixtecs and Zapotecs featured on my last post have several high profile, high ranking priests, warlords and officer figures with battle flags in each bag of 8 figures, not the rank and file “lumpen proletariat” of the PBI (poor bloody infantry) that you actually want.

It’s like having a Wellington or Napoleon on every sprue of Napoleonic figures or a free Hitler or Stalin on every WW2 German or Russian infantry one.

The Chintoys Mixtecs and Zapotecs are closely modelled on Angus McBride’s colourful plates in the Osprey book of Aztecs, Mixtec and Zapotec Armies.

So the solution to three Oracular High Priests is to paint one like the colour plate, keep one spare for a Celtic or Native Shaman in future and promote the third to a Mixtec Queen.

This striking Queen figure is shown in the colour plate but sadly not included in the Chintoys set.

The priest face and mask is not very feminine, nor are the massive sinewy muscly arms and giant hands but this priestly left arm and hand is transcribed from her Queen pose to the Priest in the Chintoys figures.

Cheap architect / railway civilian figure in hard plastic became the head donor

The challenge to behead or deface required sprue cutters and scalpel. A square of the priest’s face and jaw mask was removed and kept for further statue / carved pillar use.

I removed the head of the female civilian railway passenger (not often you get to type that sentence) from this figure in hard plastic.

The challenge was to trim and shave in small slivers with a scalpel the back of the female head down to a squarish face plate to fit onto the faceless priest – and not slice your fingers off at the same time.

The priest needed to have the face platform further trimmed back into the head.

I decided to simplify the priestly robes with the white and red stripe tribal pattern.

Once I had the female face down to as thin as possible without damaging the front and the slot on the priest suitably trimmed back, I used a small hand drill to pin the new female face in place and superglued to secure it.

A colourful turban and hair was created to fill the edge gaps using kitchen towel and PVA glue.

The Princess / Queen figure had her arm in a different position holding an obsidian tipped spear rather than the blue stone club or war hammer in the Priests hand. I trimmed the arm off with sprue cutters, reangled with drill and pun and the shoulder gap filled with tissue paper / kitchen towel.

The muscly arm was slightly trimmed down to make it more feminine.

The war hammer was removed and the hand drilled to take a spear or staff. The obsidian blade tip was made with masking tape, the pompom was made from a shaved plastic flag or banner pompom section from another figure.

Her giant left hand still needs trimming or obscuring, possibly with bloodied cloth of a sacrifice?

Now with added Britain’s Zoo plastic Eagle …

A valuable and regal addition to my semi fictional ImagiNations ManoTINcas tribe.

Plate Notes

For further information on each figure in the Angus McBride illustration, here are the plate notes by John Pohl the author (below).

From this I took the idea of her painted face, although I did mine on copper, not yellow pigment.

The turban around the hair intwined with coloured cloth and the obsidian blade were two other features that I took from this description and painting.

An excellent Osprey book, well worth buying for the history by John Pohl and the striking illustrations by Angus McBride that complement these unusual Chintoys figures.

Blog posted by Mark ManofTIN on 28/29 November 2020