Surely not more unseen WW2 photos?

[Dioramartin]

As some of you liked my recent Almost Astrakhan thread because the photos looked quasi-original, forgive me for being unable to resist re-visiting this set, dating from early 2018 when I posted them on the old Armorama site. Some newer Kitmaker members may be interested in when nostalgia wasn’t what it used to be.

Back then I’d just finished a large pyro-centric Kursk diorama (GAZ convoy) portraying Rudel’s Stuka Kanonvogel attacking a Red Army supply column. I then happened to revisit the Missing Links forum, where Eric Reisz had/has for years been regularly posting batches of original WW2 photographic prints being auctioned or sold on Ebay & other outlets, typically photos taken by ordinary German servicemen.

Some of the images Eric was posting appeared to have been decaying in old albums ever since the war, presumably being sold off by family descendants. A rich & free source of original pictorial material never previously published.

So I thought it might be fun to see how closely I could replicate the appearance of those period photos with images from my just-completed dio, shamelessly manipulated by amateurish artistry using basic MS Paint. The set is a mixture of imagined German personal snapshots & Soviet propaganda samples. And then I went a little crazier still with imitation newsreel frames…

As you can see I wasn’t trying to con anyone, the tiny print on each image co-credited Mike Koenig because he’d helped tidy up some of the original dio photographs with various cool/subtle Photoshop tweaks.

It was just an attempt at the final step towards the illusion of Realism that starts with buying a kit.

Strictly for entertainment (and OK some momentary fakery) purposes only

[SamS]

Thanks heaps Tim! Nice work on these.

I have to say the weekly posts of Eric Reisz on ML are the only reason I check that forum. The saturation advertising is too frustrating and, being on a mobile device, there’s not much I can do to minimise that.

But every Saturday morning (aus time) I struggle through the advertising bombardment and devour Eric’s posting of these photos. I can only handle accessing that site for the length of his post then it’s just too much. But your photo adaptations would fit nicely into his weekly post.

Maybe you could be the Kitmaker version of Eric and do a weekly post of dioramas or vignettes or whatever we’re calling them, altered to look like historical photos. I’m sure I just heard you volunteer your services to do that……

[Dioramartin]

Agreed about Eric’s contribution to modelmakers’ research, he’s one of a kind.
Nah, as for my spoofs I think I’d risk being drummed out of the forum for deception if I went all-out to fake my stuff or someone else’s. That’s if it was semi-convincing of course, I don’t think I’m there. Besides I think it would pall very quickly, if not already. But y’know there’s a few Renoirs out there which ain’t what they claim to be & they’ll never catch me…

I should confess my life of crime started early, this is a photocopy of a Degas ballerina sketch I did at Uni in ‘77– the model was my then g/f who I gave the original to. We took it to our Art History tutor claiming we’d found it in an antiquarian bookshop. Fooled him for approx. 30 seconds. Nearly 50 years on I’d imagine the weathering must look even more convincing now, not so much the artistic elements…

[Uncle-Heavy]

@Dioramartin

Fooled him for approx. 30 seconds.

That’s a good effort,
he didn’t catch it immediately.
Worthy of a Honourable Mention at least.

[varanusk]

@SamS

I have to say the weekly posts of Eric Reisz on ML are the only reason I check that forum. The saturation advertising is too frustrating and, being on a mobile device, there’s not much I can do to minimise that.

In case it is easier for you, he posts the sames on Facebook as well

[Dioramartin]

Thanks - well, he was a published expert on Degas & other Impressionists – the best kind of researcher, went back to and/or dug up original docs, a committed mythbuster. We’d had a bet – she said it would take him 5 minutes, I thought it would take him 2 minutes to de-frame it & another minute after that. But for that half minute I began to think I had a promising career ahead of me. By a curious relevance to here, my biggest mistake was over-weathering it (sound familiar ?) with a couple of gallons of tea.

[JPTRR]

@Dioramartin

over-weathering it (sound familiar ?) with a couple of gallons of tea.

If you had used Southern sweet tea she’d probably still be trying to get the picture off her fingers because it’s stuck there by all the sugar.

[Dioramartin]

Sorry you threw me there for a second - her sticky fingers…but that’s not important right now, I did use “authentic” hand-made paper (sometimes known as um laid paper…) which wouldn’t have been acid-free. Meaning it would eventually suffer those brown spots known as um foxing. I was also going to discuss “tea-bagging” but I’m in enough trouble already

[JPTRR]

About art departments and communities.

In between my time in USAF and resuming flight training I headed back to college for Commercial Art/Graphic Design, to my final semester and the student art show. Since I was a “militaristic creep” in the art department, I was not one of the favorites of the art department and not only that, but I was also a bastard son of the department because I had the gall to go into commercial art. I submitted artwork for the show all the same.

I had never used a Polaroid Instamatic camera and monkeying around with one, I accidentally triggered it while flailing my arms around; it perfectly framed my friend who was sitting in front of an exterior window, nicely backlit. The photograph was all blurry with weird colors and one could barely make out a human form in it. I threw the photograph away. But I threw it away into a bag of Sunday comics I would take back to college. My roommate and I were going through the comics and he found the photo, and we joked that I should enter it into the art show. Not being one of those people who understand jokes from actual suggestions, I cut up a really nice elaborate mat for it and entered it.

The art department flew in some well-known art professor from a big California university to adjudicate the show. While he picked some of the faculty’s favorite students as best of the show, etc., he also picked a lot of people that the faculty did not think were worthy of being in the department, let alone the show. One of those unwashed and unclean outcasts was yours truly. One artwork the judge picked was the polaroid! (There’s a sub-story about that piece that has to do with when they ask me how much I wanted to value it at for insurance purposes. That put a crosshair on me immediately!)

Opening night and my roommate saw my piece, and began telling everybody our secret. Not only that but most of the people that came to the show with me were athletes and science types, and they were running around being obnoxious asses. Word quickly reached me that the faculty saw me as persona non grata and we were going to have “a chat.”

Then the unexpected integrity of one of the faculty’s favored fair-haired kids triggered by the department’s malfeasance came to my rescue. You see, after the judge judged the show, the faculty heaped great servile fawning praise upon him at a sumptuous banquet to thank him for deigning himself to come to our little school and grace it with his enlightened genius. (Maybe not the exact words but that’s how a couple of buddies who were in attendance quoted the department chairman.) The faculty dumped him off at the airport and rejudged the show even before his plane landed back in California.

So while I was wandering around with my friends asking them to tone it down, and noticing the growing number of faculty glaring at me and murmuring among themselves and lighting me up like a Christmas tree with laser sight dots (figuratively), in burst Natalia – one of the faculty’s favored fair hair wonders. In she came like an avenging angel, took down all of her work (including Best of Show), put up a letter of protest, and left. She protested them rejudging the show and had even called the professor, telling him what the faculty had done.

Suddenly, I was the last thing on their minds.

And my polaroid remained on the Honorable mention wall.

Cheers,

Fred