Sunday, March 31, 2013

Seduced By The Barmaid ... Or How Miniatures Sometimes Get Painted

Well, it wasn't quite like this.

She spoke German, not Italian. But there she was, way at the back of the painting queue, and somehow she caught my eye.

Perhaps you, good reader, are careful to enforce discipline in your painting queues. Figures are painted by project, or by time waiting in the lead mountain, or some such rule. I try to have guiding principles such as these, but I confess I am a victim to my own self-diagnosed painting ADHD. The problem is confounded by a shapely leg and a saucily poised beer stein.

She is the Reaper Miniatures Oktoberfest Fraulein, purchased for my Weird War Two project, which is still a vague mass of ideas and scenes from old films that only exist in my head. I sort of envisioned her as an Allied agent or resistance fighter, infiltrating German beer halls to worm secrets out of lager-addled Nazis, perhaps something along the lines of the late Ingrid Pitt's character Heidi from Where Eagles Dare. <

I can't resist, more Ingrid here:

Where was I? Oh, right. While I was painting some samurai figures for Curt's Analogue Hobbies painting challenge, she caught my eye from a box of unpainted figures tucked on a shelf by the painting bench. A finger beckoned, a promise of some good Munich beer, and a sly wink, and I was putty in her hands. Besides, as I mentioned here earlier, since she knew that I had no geisha girl figures on hand, she promised to be a calming influence on the samurai, and she was, mostly, though, like cats to their owners, they kept bringing her body parts.

Here's the final result.

Yes, I know, shocking for a middle-aged clergyman to be painting figures such as these. I'm shocked myself. And to think she was painted during Lent.

The samurai angle got me thinking about a character background for this charming lady. Let me know if you think this works. From Project Alice Personel Files, Top Secret Operative: Ingrid Pittcairn Code Name: KATANA Biography: Daughter of British missionary teacher (The Rev. Lancelot Andrews Pittcairn) and Austrian missionary nurse (Irene Pittcairn, nee Gammel) who met while working in Japan in the 1920s. British citizen, fluent in English, German, Japanese and Chinese. Largely raised on the northern island of Hokkaido, where her family befriended a Buddhist monk with training in the anciet samurai arts. Rv. Pittcairn, an eccentric and liberal-minded father, indulged his daughter when she asked the monk to teach in the martial arts. Upon her father's death in 1935, Ingrid and her mother settled with relatives in Vienna, but fled to England following the Anschluss. Ingrid enrolled in languages at Oxford University, but left her studies following a dispute over her being forbidden to participate in varsity fencing. She was recruited by Intelligence as a linguistic analyst, working in the Asia section, but a meeting with Padre Tristram Mercer, a friend of her father's, led to ber being taken on by Project Alice. Ms. Pittcairn has no special supernatural aptitude or abilities, but her knowledge of Buddhist meditation practices, her keen mind, linguistic abilities and athleticism, it is believed, will make her well-suited for the kind of work to be expected of Project Alice operatives.

Sound plausible? Remotely plausible? Bad fiction plausible? Quentin Tarantino plausible?

Now, if only someone were to sculpt a Bavarian beer garden girl wielding a samurai sword, I could die a happy man.

13 comments:

  1. I was quite disappointed when that woman turned into a car!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well that brightened my morning; I'm afraid my painting queue protocol is constantly ravaged by similar tales of distraction. I think she would certainly has jumped the queue here at Awdry Towers, just for 'Where Eagles Dare' reference alone.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lovely figure Padre, but painting her during Lent? *tut, tut* ;)

    ReplyDelete
  4. :)
    My painting queue is constantly upset by gamer-ADD too.
    And your back story is at least Quentin Tarantino plausible, but that isn't saying much. I've seen much thinner thread used to get figures into Pulp games.
    Nicely done.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi, everybody! My name is John and I suffer from Painting-ADD. Since we're here in the group meeting, I can speak freely. My table holds 25mm Wehrmacht, 15mm Prussian Garde du Corps, 20mm Imagi-nation Cossacks, and a 28mm Alice in Wonderland with White Rabbit. And that's just the front rank. I'd best talk to my sponsor, but he paints, too!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Nice figure although testing the limits...
    I really like the CV of the lady

    ReplyDelete
  7. I would paint or sculpt some "Rüschen unterhosen" on the figure for "historical context."

    That's a charming figure, well painted I might add that to my Hinterland female Hussar forces.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree that some unterhosen might be appropriate. I can't imagine Ingrid Pitt losing her knickers to the seedy paws of Richard Burton.

      Delete
  8. Such a charming derri- ... such a charming damsel. The CV is fine for almost any kind of fictional or fantasy world, especially one involving the supernatural. But I'd quite like it if Ingrid Pittcairn were the sort of lass who eschewed firearms and edged weapons as crude and unrefined; that she was a high level Tai Chi exponent, having been taught by the blind Hokkaido Sensei Hittanbashi Sokituya.

    Why a Chinese Martial Art rather than, say, the Way of Bushido? Hokkaidans being ethnically different from the Nipponese majority upon the northernmost major Japanese Island tended to be looked down upon by the latter. It was not easy finding suitable and lasting instruction in the Way. The young Sokituya travelled abroad to Korea, China and Tibet, seeking knowledge in the Martial Arts of those places, and settled upon the Tai Chi as the highest and most profound of them all.

    After forty-seven years of disciplined study and practice, he returned to his homeland and secured a position bodyguarding a local military governor. Blinded in a successful defence of his employer against a night attack by nine ninja, Hittanbashi Sokituya retired to the village where, shortly afterward, he struck up a friendship with the young Ingrid Pittcairn after he whaled into a gang of local youths who were attacking her as a devil-eyed foreigner (Ingrid's eyes being a cornflower blue as forthright as the edge of her tongue when aroused to anger).

    Though by Oriental standards, Ingrid's mastery of Tai Chi is a trifle below the very top echelons of expertise, she is nevertheless well equipped to deal with even the most importunate European male oppressors...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My dear Ion, this is terrific stuff. Your knowledge of Japanese and oriental culture quite exceeds my own, though I detect a little nonsense in the good sensei's name. Please consider this stolen.

      Delete
    2. You are most welcome: I should be extremely flattered. As I am by your quite mistaken praise of my knowledge of Japanese and Oriental culture - not that I have made anything up, you understand... :-)
      Cheers,
      Ion

      Delete
  9. Back in my younger years, I dated a few Italian women (but not at the same time.) The girl in the video made me remember them. That was pretty much the same treatment I got...and no, I am not complaining!

    Cheers,
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

Blog Archive

Followers