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
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……
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…
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.
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
