Decorate your game room or man cave with canvas art prints!

Brendan Bailey of www.easycanvasprints.com is offering a new service for military historians, wargamers, history buffs, photography buffs, and home decorators — photographs professionally printed onto high quality canvas and mounted on a wooden frame for display. These would be a cool addition to your game room, as you can customize the artwork with your own photography of your tabletop wargames, favorite battlefield scene, your Civil War or other living history reenactor unit, etc.

He also offers a large selection of his own stock photography of landscapes, cityscapes, battlefields, monuments, animals, and other topics, including several Civil War shots such as the one shown above from the Gettysburg National Military Park in south-central Pennsylvania.

It’s actually quite simple. I visited Brendan’s website (link above) and downloaded a nice photograph of my wife and me and two family members standing in front of Hazlett’s Battery on Little Round Top. In just a few keystrokes I had uploaded my digital photo, selected the size I wanted and the type of edge finish, and then I was ready to check-out. It took only a few minutes from start to finish. Within 2 weeks, I received a well-packaged canvas print in the mail, which arrived in excellent condition. It was of high quality, with a very nice appearance. He had retouched and optimized the color imagery before transferring the digital photo to the canvas. Debi and I proudly added it to our display of family pictures.

If you are looking for something unique and personal for your game room or another picture for your den or office, check out Brendan’s website. Be sure to mention the Charge! blog.

For more information, contact the company at

www.easycanvasprints.com

Some Gettysburg photos from August 2011

Here are some random photos I took in mid-August 2011 during a visit with three of my family members. The battlefield is beautiful in the late summer / early autumn!

10mm Zouaves by Pawel Chrzanowski

Pawel Chrzanowski is back with another set of photographs of his marvelously painted 10mm Civil War figures from his collection. These are quite simply some of the finest examples of painted Union zouaves you will see! The detail is amazing, especially for such a small scale. I thank Pawel for allowing the Johnny Reb Gaming Society to use some of his pictures on our web site. They originally appeared on his friend Maciek’s “With Zeal and With Bayonets Only” website. Visit that site to see many more photos of work by both Pawel and Maciek.

Wm. Britains dioramas at Manassas and Gettysburg

Wm. Britains has long been one of the best producers of collectible 54mm toy soldiers. In recent years, they have been producing dioramas as advertising pieces. Shown above is a part of the diorama at the Gettysburg National Military Park’s museum bookstore in the Visitors Center.

Here are two photographs of a similar diorama in the Visitors Center at Manassas.

Some more 10mm ACW figures from Pawel Chrzanowski

Talented figure painter and long-time wargamer Pawel Chrzanowski has been a regular contributor to the Johnny Reb Gaming Society’s Charge blog with his stunning photographs of his 10mm American Civil War collection. His ability to highlight and detail these tiny figures is amazing.

Many gamers of 10 and 15mm figures paint them using the “2-foot” rule, that is, detail them just enough so that they look good to the onlooker two feet from the gaming table. Not Pawel. His are museum-quality figures, as can be seen from the above picture. The cannon model is from GHQ and the gunners are from Langton Miniatures and Magister Militum.

 

Wargaming in History, Vol. 3 – Gettysburg 1863

John Drewienkiewicz and Adam Poole have produced a fascinating and well illustrated new book on wargaming the American Civil War battle of Gettysburg. Volume 3 of the popular Wargaming in History series, this book carries on the tradition of the two earlier volumes in terms of quality of the photographs and the broad appeal of the content. The authors and several others played a series of regimental-level wargames based upon the fighting at Brandy Station, Barlow’s Knoll, Sickles’ Folly, and Pickett’s Charge. They present a detailed after-action report replete with hand-drawn maps of the various troop movements, and describe the battle action and results in the text.

Ken Trotman Publishing of Huntingdon, England, produced this book on high quality coated-two-side enamel paper with full color offset reproduction of the images and text. Priced at $50.0o U.S. , this book is a worthy addition to the gaming library. It is available in the U.S. from On Military Matters, 31 West Broad Street, Hopewell, N.J. 08525. In the UK, the book is carried by the publisher, Ken Trotman Ltd. (www.kentrotman.com).

Making model trees for your wargaming layout

Here are some links sent to me by Bob Glorioso of the Stillmeadow Crossing Model Railroad group here in historic York, Pennsylvania. Some of these websites are useful for getting ideas for modeling trees for miniature wargaming layouts.

Wood dowel, wire branches (mass production)
http://tiny.cc/y7l8z

Bottle brush pine
http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/5622

“Wispy” pines (see the second half of the article)
http://www.pmrr.org/Articles/Scenery/Trees.htm

Fern-branch pines from dowels
http://www.hem.passagen.se/tiking/PDF/pinetreearticle.pdf

Fern-branch pines from balsa
http://www.northriverrailway.net/Trees01.htm

Furnace filter trees
http://gameterrain.info/articles/trees4_filter.html
http://forum.atlasrr.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=31769&whichpage=1

Scrub pad trees
http://www.modelrailroader.ca/niagara-escarpment-system/scenery/spruce-trees-from-scrub-pads/

Autumn trees (dried flowers and melted plastic straw)
http://www.modelrailroader.ca/niagara-escarpment-system/scenery/autumn-trees/

A thread with really inspiring pictures of model trees, but you have to do a lot of clicking and reading to find the secrets (link to middle of thread)
http://www.modelrailroadforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5015&page=16

Free on-line scenario for First Bull Run / First Manassas 1861

Here is a link to a very interesting on-line scenario for the July 1861 fighting along Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia. While written specifically for the Civil War Command rules set, this scenario should be adaptable for several other leading rules systems.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of First Bull Run, a battle that stunned the North and gave hope to the South. It also showed the folly of promoting a brevet major in the adjutant’s office to brigadier general when that officer, Irvin McDowell, had little tactical or strategic field experience. McDowell would be replaced by the much more experienced George B. McClellan, who proved to be a strong trainer and organizer, but too cautious and indecisive on the battlefield. President Lincoln’s revolving door in the leadership of the Army of the Potomac would finally stop with George Gordon Meade in 1863 (and with U.S. Grant who traveled with that army in ’64-’65).

For the South, the two principle leaders at First Manassas, P.G.T. Beauregard and Joseph Johnston, would go on to high profile, if not always successful, careers in the Confederate army. Johnston would be wounded in 1862 during the Peninsula Campaign, opening the way for Robert E. Lee.

It’s interesting to compare the organization and order of battle at First Bull Run to that of the much larger opposing armies just a year later on the Peninsula. A handful of the generals are the same, and several colonels had been promoted. Of note is the massive increase in the size of the armies. Both sides had roughly 18,000 men engaged at Manassas; those numbers were substantially higher the rest of the war.