Camping, but with tanks

Here’s my first complete figure available on Cults3D. It’s a 3D scan of my son in some clothes that were close to what I wanted, and then I sculpted in the parts to make it historically accurate, in this case of an Afrika Korp self-propelled artillery crewman in 1940-41. The head and boots were sculpted from scratch in Nomad Sculpt and Blender. My first figure in what I hope will be a series called the 200 Series. I chose this subject out of necessity for a 1/35 scale diorama I’m planning, but wanting to make casualty figures was a long-term goal of my digital sculpting.

I’ve always felt it was odd after years in the 1/35 scale armor modeling community that so few dioramas featured casualties. One reason is that there are simply very few casualty sculpts available. There’s this conceit that somehow showing casualties in your modeling is distasteful which I consider ridiculous. After all we are often modeling subjects from WWII, the most destructive conflict in human history where tens of millions were killed. To me some dioramas looked like “camping, but with tanks.” To me, figures are the most expressive part of armor modeling and are there to tell the story. And sometimes that story can be grim and sad. I’ll never understand the need to depict ultra-accuracy with a vehicle while ignoring the reasons it existed. It feels disingenuous somehow (in my opinion of course).

My creations for this series will be drawn from real historical photos but will not be models of specific people, but instead amalgams of various sources, real life model poses, and my imagination. I don’t feel they need to be overly gruesome to be effective, but sometimes maybe that will happen. We’ll have to see. Maybe I can fill a niche with these, but no matter what they will help me tell the stories I want to with my hobby.