Just a bit of fun and a respectful nod to a book that has brought so much pleasure. The front cover of One Hour Wargames by Neil Thomas, must be one of the most familiar images on our collective bookshelves. It is an interesting choice by the author / publisher, when one considers that with the included rules spanning from Ancients through to WWII, many choices of iconic material to ‘dress’ the book must have been considered.
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| The original book artwork to the cover |
Anyway, in the original east front scene (above), we have a KV-1 tank with elements of a Soviet rifle section on and around the tank and a wooden dwelling and a pine forest in the background.
For our first little photo recreation, I have taken a 1/72 KV-1s model from Pegasus, a selection of 1/72 Soviet infantry in summer dress from Plastic Soldier Company, a resin ‘L’ shaped cottage from Lancer Miniatures and some fir trees picked up from a model rail store.
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| The scene on my table in 1/72 |
The KV-1s come as a fast build kit with two models in the box. With a lot of fast build, the entire wheel / track assembly is done in one piece, but here there are a set of inner wheels that have to be individually added and the direction of their associated wheel suspension arms had me a bit confused. When the penny eventually dropped - it was dead simple! adding some nice depth to the running gear. Overall, a nice model.
I do have a couple of wooden cottages (plastic kit) from Pegasus, but wanted to do something slightly different and highlight Lancer Miniatures, who do some lovely resin buildings for the east front.
The hard plastic 1/72 figures were one of the first sets produced by PSC, amazingly started all the way back in 2008. The grenade thrower is in an inexplicably awkward pose.
Next up, I repeated the scene in 15mm. The KV-1s is a plastic kit from Battlefront and the figures from Peter Pig. The wood effect building is a resin from Iron Clad Miniatures, who do some really nice stuff in 15mm.
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| The scene on my table in 15mm |
Zvezda also do a nice fast build 1/100 (15mm) KV-1c, this being the earlier model that has a more angular turret. The Peter Pig figures are nicely animated. I have based them with 4 figures on 40mm x 30mm plastic bases
Finally, just a bit of messing around with a 15mm image using the PicsArt app for the iPad. I thought I might run a few of these sort of images to either insert into a scenario sheet or a rule set.
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| 'Arty' style, a KV-1 moves through the village |
Resource Section.
My sister webspace COMMANDERS is a bit more snippet based than here. Link.