Protecting My Men

My lovely wife bought me a craft bag from Spotlight a while back - it was on the sale table for $10 and she figured it might be useful for me to carry my army in. My army fitted perfectly, but I knew I was going to have to be careful, because they were essentially loose in plastic boxes.

No worries I thought, it only has to go to and from my erratic gaming nights. Of course, as Murphy's law would have it, the first corner I drove round on the way to Aaron's, the bag fell over and made a horrible noise - the noise of painted metal men being jumbled together with no protection - kinda like a mass drunken orgy, not in the nice Hollywood sense though, more like the kind that leaves you sick in your stomach with regret. Not that I've ever experienced a mass orgy, I'm just being figurative.

I won't make that mistake again I though to myself and on the way home, restrained the bag with the seat belt on the front passenger seat. Of course, in South Auckland we don't have nice smooth roads, so by the time I got home, my men were a little jumbled up.

So today, in preparation for the next gaming night - hopefully this Wednesday - I bought some foam to keep the men all snug and in place.

Bag: $10
Foam: $5

Not bag for a tidy, portable way of carrying my army around.

Painting Progress

Even slow progress is progress.

Time to get Motivated!

I kind of figured that my lack of motivation for painting might be partially due to the state of my painting area. So in an effort to get motivated I decided to tidy up! Also, I'm going to try and paint one coat/colour most days after work to try and get my base Airborne Army finished in time for some summer gaming!

Hitler Moves East

Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-43 is a unique photography project from US artists David Levinthal and Garry Trudeau that was originally published in 1977. But the book, which documents the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, isn’t quite what it appears to be at first glance. While all the images are photographs, they’re actually all of toy soldiers arranged upon a series of intricately modeled dioramas.

To achieve the skewed sense of realism, Levinthal and Trudeau combined “archival materials” with their miniature settings, reconstructing scenes from Hitler’s eastward expansion that took place between 1941 and 1943. The results are certainly unnerving (images of war, made from toys?) but strangely emotive, bringing together notions of harmless imagined play and its antithesis, the horrors of early twentieth century warfare.

Levinthal has been working with toy figures and tableaux in his artwork since 1972, while Trudeau is more well-known as the creator of the comic strip Doonesbury, which launched in 1970.

“I became intrigued at how seeming reality could be constructed from mere models,” says Levinthal. “Over the more than 30 years that I have been working as an artist, I never ceased to be amazed at how much these figures and toys can tell us about ourselves.”