- Scale
- 1:35
- Size
- 54 mm
- Category
- Miniature
Desert Rat, Tobruk 1941
An Eighth Army soldier in shorts and sun-bleached drill, squinting into the glare.
Price
NZ$165
plus shipping from New Zealand
This piece has sold.
Ships from New Zealand, wrapped like it's going to war. Shipping: NZ NZ$8, Australia NZ$18, rest of world NZ$30.
Step one, step last
Primer to paint
Every piece starts grey. Here is what the brushwork adds.
True to scale
How small is it?
Photos lie about size. This doesn't: everything below is drawn to the same millimetre ruler.
About 2.0x the length of a $2 coin.
From the workbench
Everything in the Western Desert was bleached, so this one is all about pale colours that still read as different things. His khaki drill is nearly cream at the shoulders where the sun would have hit it, and the shorts are a shade darker from sitting in the back of a truck.
I gave him a sunburnt neck, a rolled sleeve, and a water bottle with a dent in it. The base is real sand from Muriwai, sieved twice and tinted with pigment so it looks more Libya than west Auckland. A single tuft of dry grass is the only living thing for miles.
This was a commission-that-was-not: I made him for a friend whose grandfather was at Tobruk, and then made a second for the shop. He has gone to a very good home.
— Sunanda