Replicating a photograph: the liberation of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, part 2

After the wordy introduction of part 1 it’s time to start building the tank! The Tamiya kit gives you lots of options to personalise/customise your Sherman. Step 1 immediately presents you with the choice whether you want to have a three-piece or a one-piece differential housing on the front of your vehicle. I obviously can’t tell which type was used on the Sherman Firefly I’m trying to replicate, as I only have a rear view. I much prefer the look of the bolted together three-part cover, but all Sherman Ic Fireflies I come across online (both original photographs and model kits) seem to have the one-piece variant. Rather than running the risk of building some sort of Frankensherman I decided to play it safe and use the one-piece cover.

The three and one-piece differential housings side by side.

Turning to the back of the vehicle, I started adding some custom bits to better match the tank in the photograph. The two eyes were made of the 0.7 mm metal wire that I bought for the Von Richthofen and Brown diorama. I also cut the two rectangular thingies out of a bit of scrap plastic. They are apparently the mounts for a leaf spring that held a towing pintle. Luckily the leaf spring wasn’t mounted in the picture, making my job a little easier.

Rear view of the Sherman

That’s it for now. Next up is to scratch build the smoke generator that is mounted in front of the right engine door.

And a quick reminder of what the end result should look like.

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt. I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

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