Monday 25 April 2022
The Emperor's Cannon
Friday 15 April 2022
A Nice Surprise
I checked my email earlier this evening to find a nice surprise had arrived. Some of you might recall that back in December I lamented some models having "got away" without ever being photographed. One of them was a German village I made for a friendly customer called Jonathon Marcus, who was for many years an international correspondent for the BBC. Well Jonathon came across my blog, took the trouble to photograph this model and send me the results, which I very much appreciate. I enjoyed poring through these images and being reminded of what I had packed into this model, half of which I had forgotten.
This was about the last piece I made for a customer, probably in about 2010. It represents a village in central Germany: Hesse or Franconia maybe, though many would be happy to call it "generic Germany". This representation wouldn't be out of place from the late Middle ages to 1945. It could be used on the table as the two sides of one village street or else two smaller "village units". There are three houses, a barn, a church and a bunch of rustic features around them.
Tuesday 5 April 2022
Chateau MDF
Another laser-cut MDF kit. tarted up for skirmish gaming. This chateau is by Sarissa precision, still available and modestly priced. It's a model you see in a lot of skirmish games, and rightly so. Nit-picking types like me would say that in size terms this isn't really big enough for a chateau, more what the French call a "maison bourgeoise", but never mind. As well as WWII skirmish, I thought this structure wouldn't be out of place in a 1920's Chicago gangster game. I see it with a sign proclaiming the "Hotel de Luxe" or something equally cheesy!
One of the nicest features of this kit as it comes is the window and door surrounds, the kind of thing that laser-cut MDF does best. I did improve most of the other features, adding characteristic tall chimneys, stonework corners ("quoins") and better wall and roof textures.Frome the side, the chimneys are very prominent, as they always are on a chateau. The car is a slightly bigger scale than the building or the figure; it's about 1/43 scale, from someone like Solido. I had bought it cheap along with some French 1/48 military models from Gaso.line. It looks the part as one of the many thousands of civilian cars requisitioned to mobilise the French army in 1940. The badge on the door is that of a Moroccan Tirailleur regiment. Three such units made up the hard-as-nails Division Maroccaine, just about the toughest formation in this unjustly maligned army. If you can see it at all, the badge comprises a mosque and palm trees over the Etoile Cherifienne, symbolising the Sultanate of Morocco.
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All wargamers have a "lead mountain", some call it the "pile of shame", comprising all the stuff we bought but haven'...