Sculpting a Palace Guard Captain

The basic shape is a Perry Miniatures' Mahdist Ansar Somali Gazzi. 
    Quite a lot of times I have seen guys on forums starting a thread that has the wording "Scratch-built" when the model they present is a conversion - sometimes hardly even that! Have I missed something? Is it the Babylonic confusion of tongues that is to blame, have I missed the meaning of scratch-built? Is it a synonym for "small conversion"?
    With above said, or asked, rather, I still would like to call this a scratch-build.

The blueprints are also my working area. The basic shape to give a safe and proportioned start is in the centre, surrounded by blobs of green stuff. Calling this piece of paper blueprints is a stretch, I can agree...

Again and again have I proved I lack the skills to make properly proportioned armatures, so nowadays I go straight for these kinds of shortcuts, and hence my question whether the word scratch-built is the right word to use. "Yes", is the answer expected ;)

The shield I made totally from scratch, though. I have become noticable more effective in use of my sculpting time nowadays, so the project trodded along nicely and I've only sunken half an evening on choosing arms, parts, the glaive (and filing it down from a piece of plasticard) and sculpting the first basic parts of the armor and head.
    The head needs a lot of work since it was a Somali head which needs to look more elven. Somalis aren't Africans per se (racially, geographically they are very much Africans), while they are not an entirely homogenous population (there are quite big differences between the rural tribes and the farmers/city people, for example, I have been told by a friend from rural Somali) they mostly look the same, just like Norwegians have a general look over the population, even if certain family lines may look drastically different from other families. I found the Somali models from Perry to be unexpectedly well suited for making elves!
    Their heads are more Eurasian - than other races in the region - with a portruding brow and other characteristics which has absolutely nothing to do with this post... ! What am I blabbing on about... ? I just like the Perry-box so much, I suppose...

Instead of making a dragon on the shield, which I think is not something an elf would brandish - just like I keep getting sooo annoyed at the Games Workshop-articles and GW-blogposts and rulebooks where orcs have white insignias(!) - I just make something palace-y and foresty but try to stay close to the original's design.

  Tough times sculpting the scale armour. Everything's tiny!

He will need a stronger chin but the nose is fine, thank the blue skies... I started this although I "need" to finish the Warriors of Dale, do the mould for the three Dale archers, take some pictures of finished projects and a lot more.
    That's it for now on this project. Below follows some technical updates.


Comments by some people have been lost! Somehow, the "Latest comments" function in the settings have stopped function periodically. This means I will manually go through the latest posts so no one will feel that I don't give a s--t about their input. Your input is highly appreciated, and I wish I could more regularly reciprocate your nice C&C and informative comments more often, but truth be told, I will keep my semi-slow pace of reading and commenting, English is not my first language, and ever since I started to proof read everything (slightly more than usual) it takes forever, even for a simple "GG HF"-like comment.

Blogger's been messing up the format of the blog, lately. I will try out another template as well as change the colours and perhaps get me a nice little... whatever they're called, those pictures with the name of the place superimposed. A header? 
     Good night.