From the age of uniformity

"Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure" - Petrarch

The main purpose behind the Great War project was to give me something to paint whenever I felt like painting. As it happens I have indeed been in the zone for a few days and so things have moved forwards. Inevitably this has required further thought on a variety of practical issues related to the rules and how it will all be manifested in a game - I'm thinking for example of basing conventions for crewed weapons - but it has also made me think about the aesthetics. Odd, perhaps, to focus on that aspect when everything is khaki and grey, but it's a side of things that does bother me.

My personal approach to painting has always been to do what is required to make the figures look OK when viewed en masse on the tabletop, and frankly not to waste time or energy by doing any more than that. I have continued with that approach into this project. The relatively small number of poses often available for figures has also never bothered me that much. Indeed for the rather stylised manner in which I have been playing Napoleonics (C&C rules on a hex/offset square grid) it seemed to me that uniformity in the ranks actually enhanced the look of the thing. Not so with WWI, my first foray into anything remotely modern for more than forty years. What one wants here, I think, and even when viewed at arms length, is the opposite: heterogeneity. I don't think the poses have to be radically different from each other - there are only so many things that one is likely to do with a rifle on a battlefield - just sufficiently so that the brain doesn't identify them all as identical as the eye scans across them.

I have no problem with doing a bit of figure remodelling; it scratches the same itch as painting. Sometime I shall have to post a photo of the model of a Napoleonic hussar dancing with a lady of dubious virtue that I wasted some time putting together a few years ago.  Anyway, as previously reported I have been chopping up Tommies throwing Mills bombs to try to get some variety, which as a consequence has left me with some customised riflemen as well. All in all the British should be OK. The problem is ordinary German riflemen. For perhaps obvious reasons most late war German infantry produced in plastic are Stormtroopers. I shall either have to up the level of my modelling skills, buy some metal figures or let the Germans do all the attacking.