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. 

Here's an overall image. The layout of each farm having a courtyard which links it to the next in a continuous facade facing the street is typical of many areas of Germany. I made it so that each enclosed area  would fit one or two of Jonathon's figure bases.

Jaegers of the Seven Years War period are posed with the model, which adds atmosphere and shows scale. I made the wicker fences by weaving some sort of fibres between posts set into the base, the same technique used in the Russian village posted a couple of months back.

The barn we see here is partially clad in overlapping planks, over the timber-framed construction. We tend to think of barns being made entirely of wood, because that's what we're used to in Britain (and the US even more so), but in most of Europe the same sort of materials were used as for houses and other buildings.

The courtyards commonly had both a person-sized door and a large gate for carts as well.

Some of the church details were cannibalised from a model railway kit by Faller. It's given a nice stained glass effect, which you can see here. My model included a walled cemetery, visible in this photo.

Another fenced enclosure for the riflemen to take cover in. Timber framing and window detailing were quite intense in some places. For the ornamental timberwork you see in some panels, I made master sections then moulded and cast them, which reduced the work a little bit.

A pigsty forms part of one yard. The occupants have their noses in the feed trough.

Here's a shed storing farm tools and wood. Partially visible to the left of it is a hen coop.

Though I say it myself, this thatched roof has come out rather nicely in texture and colour. I think I used a mixture of materials to make the thatch in this project. This one is "teddy fur", where other roofs look more like the plumbers' hemp insulation material I used to use. 

Deja Vu in Wargames Illustrated

In my post of 18th November, I mentioned that checking copyright permission to use these WI cover photos from 1989 produced a nice request from editor Dan Faulconbridge for a piece in the next issue. No sooner said than done, because here is the short piece we agreed which has now been published in WI 409, the new issue. I suppose it's definitely a sign of having been around for a long time when something you remember doing only a few years ago comes back as a nostalgia-based article! If anyone has found this blog because of the WI piece, welcome, and please leave a comment.

Dan is interested in publishing "how-to" articles from me in future, so that is something I will be thinking about in due course. I'm not sure whether, these days, it's more help to more people to publish such a thing in a magazine or online. Perhaps the answer is both, if we can find a way to do that. 

Anyway, you may be thinking, enough of this fluff, where are the new photographs of scenic models we've been promised for several weeks now? Close, hopefully; I now have a camera, a lighting rig, a neutral background and Phil's shown me how to set it up. Unfortunately I took one look at the controls and the manual for the camera and it was my turn to have a glazing-over of the eyes. But I will knuckle down to learning how to use the beast, just as soon as the Christmas period is over.

Talking of which, Merry Christmas to everyone! It's been a ropey year for many of us, not least on account of the virus. But that's what we have  hobbies for: something creative and interesting to focus on is a good way to cheer ourselves up when there's gloom in the real world!

The Last Post and the Ones That Got Away

This isn't really the last post from Hand Built History, but it's the last one to consist solely of a bit of written fluff plus images from my desktop archive, because I am all out of them now. However, this brings us to Phase Two  I do have a good few more things I have built which I didn't photograph because there was no "platform", if that's the right word, to publicise them. I wasn't selling anything, my mates saw the actual models, and I had no need and no means to photograph them. I am now broadly set up to take pictures again though, with Phil Olley's advice, and will be experimenting with this during the coming week. Depending how that goes we may have posts of miniature Belgium, Belorussia or Bohemia in a few days time. Get the little "teaser" there, eh!

Today though, here's three images of a German village house I made with and for Phil, whose Imagi-Nations set up you will know about. My idea was that I was going to show him how quick and easy it really was, he would help in this and then fly off to make his own buildings. But we spent a couple of long evenings making this and then another long evening just starting to paint it, and I could see Phil's eyes glazing over a bit! Really it was a daft idea to start with a timber-framed building, because they are time-consuming to make and fiddly to paint. So I finished it off myself, presented it to Phil earlier this year and in no time he had photographed it as part of the "fairy-tale Germany" over which his Vaubarians and what-not campaign so winsomely.

Before you get to the pictures though, I wanted to mention, or lament really, the Ones That Got Away, the buildings I didn't get photographs of and no longer have the opportunity to do so, hence they will probably not be seen now. Which is a pity, because they were some of my nicest work. 

Mostly these were made with and for my much-missed friend Mark Sturmey, who passed away four years ago now after bravely fighting Motor Neurone Disease. Mark had eclectic interests in terms of wargames periods and the models concerned were for the Trojan Wars and the Carlist Wars in the Basque region of 1830's Spain. Some of this was models I made as presents for Mark, some he paid me for and a some we made between us, as Mark was learning to build terrain very skilfully before the cruel condition took away the strength of his hands. Mark's family retained all these models. Anyway, the Trojan things comprised houses and a temple meant to eventually go behind the walls of Troy; it was interesting to research a very different period, There was a lot more Spanish stuff though: a town, a unique Basque farm, a storehouse, wells, wayside crosses and a beautiful baroque church.

Finally, I made some lovely German village units for a friendly customer called Jonathon Marcus, who used to work for the BBC. I think I probably photographed them at the time, but those images never got stored on my PC, so are lost. 

That's my little lament over. Here's Phil's house and I hope to have more stuff for you before many days at all. Cheers.

 

German Town Wall Again

This is a set of German town walls I made for David Imrie in 2006. Apologies for the distracting background to these photographs: too much blue sheet and too much of my old back garden in Coventry! The dull light also reminds me now of being up at dawn that day, between an all-nighter to finish the model and driving to the Partizan show to hand it over. Anyone who makes models will be familiar with being up all night to finish a model before a deadline. It is an iron law, somehow, that every model always takes longer than you expect: sometimes only a bit longer, sometimes twice as long. But there's a satisfaction in hanging in there and getting the job done. Anyway the final photo here was taken recently by Dave himself and shows the benefit of a proper foreground, a proper background and some nice figures to set the model off.

As you can see, this project comprised a gatehouse, three round towers and four lengths of wall, one with a stairway. The usual techniques and materials have been used: foamcard, balsa, Wills sheets and resin cast parts. There were some big castings here: the roof of each wall section is cast as one piece, as are the tower roofs.

When I look at this now, I can see a lot of difference from the similar model I made for myself almost twenty years earlier. This one is a lot "crisper", as modelmakers say, by which we mean neater, cleaner and more sharply defined. You can see what material every part is supposed to be made of. I like the colour better too, as it's atmospheric and pleasant without being garish

The Dresden Villages

In the mid-2000's I made some models for US wargamer Matt Pavone, who was keen to refight the Battle of Dresden, 1813. I did a lot of research and we had all kinds of plans to build the Gross Garten park, the old city walls, even the famous palaces and churches of that spectacular city! But in the end we only got as far as a series of four village units, which you see below. I also used one as the header photograph for my blog, as I thought it gave an instant idea of what it is about.

The design of each village unit in this case was to be a single piece with room for one of Matt's 16-figure infantry units to fit on the base. Within that, I wanted to make the layout of each unit different.  These aren't Matt's figures you see here by the way, but those of my lifelong wargames accomplice Garry Broom, who has thousands of figures for this period and adds hundreds more every year. One day we'll even get round to having a game with them!

Anyway, these villages were based on proper research into the style of "vernacular" buildings in Saxony, rather than just being "generically German". In this area it was common for buildings to have their ground storey made of field stone, with the upper floor being timber-framed. As in many places the appearance of the churches depended at least as much on when they had been built as on any local style preference. This simple structure would have been built in the early Middle Ages, and could be almost anywhere in Germany, although the rather bright ochre colouring is common around these parts. Oddly, the fences weren't altogether generic. Wicker and vertical-plank fences exist across Germany, but the horizontal-plank version was most typical of Saxony and Brandenburg.

Thirty Years War Castle

Today we have a larger model and one of my favourites. It was built during the 2000's for Scottish gamer Dave Imrie, of League of Augsburg and Claymore Castings fame. Dave wanted a mediaeval German castle but as it might have stood during the 17th century. There are many contemporary engravings which show this kind of structure. Away from the epic battles of the Thirty Years War, local campaigns went on across The Empire for loot and regional control, often resolving themselves as small-scale sieges. In this case the defences have improved by constructing a large artillery redoubt lower down the hill on which the castle stands.

In design terms, I wanted something that would be impressively vertical, without exaggerating the individual components. You can see it rises in stages from the hill to the castle yard, then the main building and finally the tower. 

The building techniques have mostly been described in earlier posts: foam card, Wills rounded tile sheets, cast details, the cliff from cork bark segments. The hill and redoubt were made from polystyrene foam, with a thick skin of filler, PVA and sand. The top of the tower with it's pepper-pot turrets was actually something I had made for my own walled town project years before, but decided it was never going to get used for that and would go nicely as part of this model.

The figures posed in the redoubt are Perry ECW, painted by my friend Garry Broom.

A German Village

Still at Hertford Uni in 2000, and having tried other kinds of model I wanted to be making historical ones. This was the time when Wargames Foundry had very ambitious plans, which I thought I might become part of. To test my work I was asked to make a wargames village and this was the result. As Foundry boss Bryan Ansell was still residing in Guernsey, I was asked to show it to his representative on earth, the sculptor Mark Copplestone. I remember spending a great afternoon with Mark in Birmingham, and seeing his sculpting, which I've always loved. He was impressed with my modelling work, and excited phone calls with Bryan ensued. Big plans were made. Foundry was all about big plans at that time.

The models found their way next to Kevin Dallimore (the famous painter of figures) who photographed them, and what you see below is part of the result. The figure of an eighteenth century artist was used by Kevin both to show scale and as a kind of trademark. The model was made to my "village unit" design, so comprised a base as well as three houses, a barn, a church a manor house, a pigsty and a muck-heap, all of which you can see here. Some of you may remember the wonderful modelling articles by "Stan Catchpol" (really Don or Bryan Fosten?) in Military Modelling magazine. One of them featured the modelling of straw and I always wanted to use the technique shown to construct a "smelly-looking" manure heap, so here it is!

The buildings and fences are authentically German-looking, but in a rather generic way. Later on I would get into researching vernacular architecture in more depth and discover that every area of Germany had its own local styles.

PS: Update: Going through my old folders I came across some more images of my Japanese castle model. As that was a popular post I have added three pictures to it now. It can be found as "My Earliest Model" under the Japan label in the blog's right-hand column.

Wargames Illustrated cover photos

Here are two pictures of my terrain and figures which appeared in Wargames Illustrated back in 1989. Duncan Macfarlane (whose recent passing away I was saddened to hear of) used to come out to people’s houses to get his photographs in those days (provided you taxied him to and from the station, and fed him!) and he travelled to my house in Coventry in late 1988. We spent a very nice day, during which he painstakingly set up his arcane camera and lighting apparatus, and photographed just two scenes of my Seven Years War figures and scenery. One of them formed the cover of WI 18, Feb 1989 and the other was published in the edition a month or two later. It was a good moment to see my work on the cover in the newsagents. 

Digging out those photographs for the blog I felt that the quality of Duncan’s photography stood the test of time very well, but blown up so large the quality of my modelmaking and figure painting in 1989 sets my teeth on edge compared to current standards! When he saw me at shows Duncan always used to say it was the best cover picture the magazine ever had, which was nice, although I used to suspect he “said that to all the girls”! He was a charming man, especially if he owed someone money! In all seriousness, Duncan did contribute massively to things by his photography and the magazines he established. His recent passing was a loss to our hobby community. 

What these pictures show is figures and vaguely Germanic village units from my Seven Years War collection. The church was built with solid Linka walls with windows glued on the outside, a la Peter Gilder. The roofs are from the Wills sheets. One of the houses started life as an Airfix cottage!

These images are scanned from my old issues of WI and are of course their copyright, so I emailed Dan Faulconbridge the current editor to ask permission to use them. Not only was he fine with that, he asked me to write up this tiny reminiscence for the magazine where it will appear in a month or two's time, along with a plug for my blog. So that was all very pleasant, even if the correspondence knocked this post out of its chronological sequence, and scanner troubles meant there was no post on 17th November. As if it matters...

The German Walled Town

Today's post brings me to the late 1980's, when I fell in love with gaming the Seven Years War. I built some generic German villages and these town walls, which served as backdrop mostly. 

The walls were built from foamcard and balsa, the towers from empty drinks cans and their upper part some sort of cardboard packaging tube. Stonework was done via the Ian Weekley method of random card stones glued on then heavily washed with filler. Flat roof surfaces were from the Wills sheets. The curved roofs were made using two or three cones of thin card and then covered in thin card tiles. The finials (the bronze widgets at the points of each roof) were made from mapping pins and Milliput. The posters on the city gates were photocopied from books and then shrunk to a suitable size; they are actual recruitment adverts from the Seven Years War, or "wanted" posters for Prussian deserters!

The whole thing was built in two sections each with a cobblestone "floor". The idea was you could use either one on the edge of the board, put them together and fill with buildings, or place them on the two sides of a river, which was the situation with many walled towns. I did plan to make some specific buildings to fill the town with, but that never happened apart from the domed church here, so for these photos it is filled up with village buildings. The stone house was a resin casting I just improved a bit and painted. The two churches were built by Peter Gilder's method, ie solid structures with cast windows just glued onto the outside.

The figures posed in these photos are all French SYW units: the Grenadiers Royaux, mounted Chasseurs de Fischer, staff and vignettes and finally allied Saxon infantry. They are Front Rank figures, but some are heavily converted from all sorts of sources. The little vignettes look great for photos, or maybe a demo game, but we found they were mainly an obstruction if you were trying to play an actual game! 

And we did play a lot of really good SYW games for about ten years in all. Apart from me the gang was Garry Broom, who painted literally thousands of figures, for a while Alec Brown of Front Rank Miniatures, and our late, much-missed friend Mark Sturmey. I did a lot of research into the period, which led me to the British Library where I dug out arcane texts in eighteenth-century French and gothic-script German. Most of this stuff is now available at a glance, in English too, on the Kronoskaf site, which I will link to. I wrote a set of SYW rules based on this research, which for a long time I was more proud of than any terrain making. I nearly got them to the point of publishing. Nearly!