No army is complete without some artillery, so here is the first completed howitzer for the French, the vaunted 75mm.
I had painted a few Forgeworld artillery pieces years ago, but this was a very new experience for me... working on the gun, the crew, and the gun emplacement itself.
An article was already posted on how that was done. Fortunately, I was already quite familiar with the 75, having painted an entire battery of them for Flames of War!
I loved creating a small vignette/diorama out of the crew and the gun. It's one of the many things which has drawn me to the WW2 genre. Not only was it fun to lay out this scene, it has come in handy during my games as well (even though light howitzers don't have spotters!).
I decided to paint the crew "in-situ", as in place (minus the gun of course!). It made it challenging to get my brush into certain locations, but I really wanted to integrate the figures into the diorama base, and that meant that a touch choice had to be made.
The foliage is a variety of Gamer's Grass products, Hangar 18 foliage, and even some old Woodland Scenics flock.
The next completed piece coming up is the 105mm scratch built howitzer. And... I will be scratch building the mighty 150mm monster. So stay tuned mon amis!!
Why the choice to attach the crew the base in lieu of basing separately and then leaving holes on the larger base for the individual crew members? It all looks great, just curious is all.
ReplyDeleteThanks! :-) As I mentioned in the post (and there might be some WIP images of that in an earlier post... I will check that out for you!), there was no way to get the ground effects that I wanted by adding the crew later. The positioning had to be quite precise to get the vignette that I wanted, so it would have been risky to add them on later. That being said, the gun was painted on its own and added, because it was only going to be pointed on one direction, and the tires could be set into the dirt more easily to mark its position... wait until you see the heavier howitzers! :-)
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