I definitely admit the issues with this scene. I can partially try blaming the good old problem of running out of time, doing far too many things this week and having zero buffer for this last round where I went for all the extras - an unfamiliar theme, a "big thing", and especially one that contains a load of fiddly bits which must be prepared, painted and gradually assembled in a strict order. No harnesses of any kind are provided with this model either so I had to build my own from scratch. It all adds up, which doesn't mix well with work deadlines.
However, that takes me to the other issue unique to this entry, which bugged me greatly, namely that a tachanka is a dastardly model for depicting in a single photo. In a front view you'd miss the gunners (and the gun) almost entirely and a lot of the cart's details too. In a side view two horses and again some of the cart are gone. In a rear view you can see the gunners but only a bit of a horse's behind and very little of the driver. If it's
not from the top, you can't see the horse team and its harnesses properly. If it
is from an elevated view, even slightly, you can't see any faces of the crew. The action is just too evenly divided on every side. When I was building the scene at ungodly hours on Friday night after returning from an all-evening event and pondered this conundrum, at some point it just turned into a proverb which contains an expletive. This was the "least bad" way I managed to come up with for showing a bit of everything, although nothing particularly well. It's a trade-off I didn't enjoy solving after midnight with the final glue joints probably still wet.
"Green on green" is admittedly a bad idea for getting any "wow" points, but on the other hand that's how camouflage colours work. It's one of the technical innovations of WWI when you think about it. Here it's unfortunately even more effective than I originally predicted. A lot is lost in 800 px resolution. Not a surprise per se as it's the tenth round of my third league, but didn't help either in this case.
By the way, the models are from Eureka and nominally 28mm, but I'd say that's only for very small values of 28. The minis are small, and only have detail I'd expect from 20mm or so. For example, you can barely distinguish some fingers, not necessarily an accurate number of them. The faces, whatever little has been sculpted there, have been painted but they're nothing to write home about. The strongest point of that model is its overall charm and that's what I tried to show. Doing just some more 28mm CoC characters instead would probably have bought me more votes, but I wanted to respect the theme round and the centennial in general. I definitely learned a lot of things - about history and assembling fiddly horse carts...
So, that's it for the excuses. I can post more angles later if you're interested in this thing.
Poll
15 February 2011, 12:20:46 AM