Wednesday 31 August 2022
Work In Progress: Baroque Chateau
Tuesday 9 August 2022
A Mini Chateau
Having posted images now of most of the terrain I built years ago, here is my most recent effort, completed only a couple of weeks ago. It is part of a project to provide terrain for games set in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. A sub-project within that greater one is to build several small chateau-type buildings. Most FPW battlefields had one or two such places, and they feature in the accounts as strongpoints being stormed at bayonet point. One battle (Coulmiers) actually had no less than six chateaus on it, but some of them were subsumed within villages so don't necessarily need modelling specifically. I decided three chateaus would cover things. Here's the first and I'm currently hard at work on the second.
I have long fancied making something in the French chateau line, as they are such nice buildings, deliberately intended to be pleasing and varied in appearance and in the larger cases impressive, with elaborate and stylish architectural features. Things being what they are of course, this desire rather clashes with the ground scale I tend to use, whereby a whole large battlefield is compressed onto a medium sized wargames table. For example in my FPW rules one inch equals a hundred metres, so a single building, even a big one, might scarcely be one inch square on its own!
But where there's a will there's a way. Studying the layout of these places I find they come in successive layers. You have the actual chateau building, but that's surrounded by an area of stables and courtyards, which in turn is enclosed within a "zone" of walled orchards and gardens several hundred metres in area. The whole thing was fought over in reality. (An example most wargamers will be familiar with is the chateau/ farm of Hougoumont at Waterloo.) I decided that I could make a nice building in my usual "condensed" style, representing the whole zone without doing too much violence to strict ground scales.
So off I went, starting with the smallest and simplest of the three chateaus planned, as something of a warm-up for the other two, which will be more elaborate. This one is in a gently neo-classical style, inspired by the Chateau of Duerckheim which stood in the village of Froeschwiller on the battlefield of that name (the one called Woerth by the Germans).
Monday 1 August 2022
A Basque Town and Farm
A couple of weeks back I showed a not-very-good picture I had stumbled across of buildings from the Basque provinces of Spain. Those models were amongst the "ones that got way" as I lamented back in December, ie the models I'd made but hadn't photographed and no longer had access to. Since then I had kindly been sent some lovely photographs of the nice German village done for Jonathon Marcus. And now I have some decent pictures of the Basque models, so the only thing still missing from the record at this stage is the Trojan setup once made for Mark Sturmey.
The new photographs came initially from my friend Simon Chick, who had photographed them during a demo game at Salute 2014. But knowing now what show it was, I was able to search for other photos of the game. And I found them on two different blogs, called History in 1/72nd and The Lost and the Damned. (I tried to contact the owners of both blogs to check they didn't mind me reposting their pictures, but got no response in either case, from which I conclude there's no reason anyone would be bothered. Of course if I hear differently I will act as appropriate). Right, here we go.
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