Rattle traps

I was thinking, the witches lack low-level fodder. The green man and knight seem too nifty to be rank-and-file. So I wondered about some kind of allied/bound minor forest spirit - faerie or pixie swarms perhaps, or dryads. I had some promising ideas in the faerie swarm direction, but in the meantime I made some scarecrows.

They seem the kind of thing that might patrol the border between the farmlands and the forest. Scary but a little silly too.

At least that was what I thought, but the final things are a bit more Halloween than what I had in mind. Maybe the pumpkin's too much. Pitchfork has my favourite head and I wonder it wouldn't have been better to keep them all having non-head heads. A bucket, or a floppy hat for example.

One of the problems of doing stickmen is how to distinguish things that are meant to be more stick-like than normal. Here I did it with the little bits of branch and the way the limb-lines cross over rather than joining neatly. That combined with the posture and ragged clothes should (I hope) make them obviously scarecrows. Unfortunately that leaves them with a lot of lines and not many areas for colour. At least it makes them distinctive.

Scarecrows are normally straw-stuffed, but that would involve a lot of extra lines to look adequate and I didn't have the budget for it. These are pretty heavy already. Though if I do another type of scarecrow it might be a big plump stuffed or wicker-man type.

Details I like: #2's right hand. The pin holding on #3's sickle-arm. #2's pumpkin stalk.

Colouring was dull in both senses of the word. I tried, but couldn't come up with any effective textures. Even my tries for a shine on the metal blades looked poor. Decided to leave them with the flats and move on.

Modular bits: Head, torso, legs, boots, each arm. Though I'd probably lump together torso+trous, or trous+boots. And I drew the arms as pairs so I'd worry about the "balance" of them if you mixed+matched. How likely is it that I'll ever get around to actually playing with modular parts? Not very! But it's fun to imagine.

Might do either the faeries or a wicker-man next. Or not.