The Devil's Den Recreated

 

The famous Gardner photograph of a dead Confederate sniper amongst 
the boulders of the Devil's Den at Gettysburg. Historians determined that
Gardner posed the picture, dragging a corpse to the site and setting the rifle upright.

I posed a similar picture using a 54mm figure and a musket casting among some large rocks from my back yard.

Same diorama, different soldier casualty figure.

The other day I was removing my 54mm Civil War figures from my game table and getting them ready to transport to my friend Keith Leidy's house so that we could conduct a play test of my Pickett's Charge game. At the last minute I decided to create a mini diorama of the famous Garnder photograph of the dead Confederate rifleman at the Devil's Den at Gettysburg.

One of the pluses of 1/32 scale or 54mm figures is that they can be used to make some war dioramas and they look better than using, say, 28mm war gaming figures.

Now I am looking around for suitable figures to recreate the famous photo of the three Confederate prisoners after the battle of Gettysburg. I did find a nice 1/32 figure of Alfred Waud sitting on a tree stump, sketch pad in hand, getting ready to draw the picture of the battlefield. Stay tuned to see that figure painted.

Update

We ran a successful playtest of Pickett's Charge yesterday, setting up the terrain and troops at Keith's mammoth game table of three 6ft by 32ft tables. I will post pictures later this week. 

And now that I have cleared all of 54mm Civil War figures off of my table, space has opened up to set up a Seven Years War battle. This will be largely an all cavalry game between the Russians (boo!) and the Prussians (huzzah!). Recent events in Ukraine reminded me of the various Russian raids into Pomerania and trans-Oder River Silesia. The Russians wantonly looted and burned down villages so in this scenario Frederick has had enough of this and has set a trap to stop and/or capture a Russian raiding party. I will be posting pictures of this game within the next week or two.