Well, tonight I am going to continue the discussion from last night on the subject of displays. In tomorrow morning's email UPDATE I spend a little time talking about my own plans for Ft. Thomas and then look once again at some historical displays that I have looked at before, which feature both 1:6th and 1:1 scale items. I see a lot of merit in that sort of approach, especially in a situation where education is a goal as well as recruitment. Tonight though, I want to take a look at some display examples from previous Ft. Thomas shows and make a few observations.

My first illustration comes from the Evil Dr. Zorkon, this is one of his figures which has been done as a very straightforward, simple display that is incredibly effective. If you had just the figure of Bob Hope on display, it would have been a great figure, but it would not told a story. Zorkon has included the story here by making it available as text and pictures. Now, those school children who have never even heard of Bob Hope can suddenly understand his (and the USO) importance to US service men in several wars.

On a somewhat larger scale was this incredible display of WWII militaria. Boy, I sure hope this guy is going to be at this year's show. This is a beautiful display and I would sure like to see it first hand. It would be a great display with the photo board and the gear, but the clerk's desk and footlocker make you feel as though you are looking at a museum display. I don't know the particular story behind this display, but what a fantastic tribute this is. This certainly falls into the category of Museum-Quality display that I have been talking about wanting to achieve. I know I can't personally put together anything this grand, but it certainly gives me a bar to shoot for.

And while we are on the subject of 1:1 stuff, all I can say Sniperjoe is that I will have money in my pocket, so bring some of this stuff to this year's show. I would be all over this table. The merchandise is well displayed. "In your face as it were" and a reenactor would be glad they came.

This display (above) appears to be purely informational, but I want to call attention to the board with the photos on it. I think this can be very effective behind any number of figure displays. Example, you have a display of WWII American figures, the backboard could have a historical picture for each figure and a brief history of the unit. Now the next couple of shots are actually really old pictures from a show in Colorado that I attended, but they kind of demonstrate what I mean.

Both of these boards are those cheap foamcore presentation boards that are used for school science fairs, etc. The first one traces the development of action figures (as they existed at that time) to give the viewer an idea of the progression. Notice at the bottom of the board the copy with large red dates. This is sort of what I mean in the previous example. This could just have easily been copy about a particular uniform or unit.

The second board I did was about scratchbuilding and customizing. Pictures and small examples displayed on the board and in front of it some actual examples. My point in all of this is that for the price of a cheap cardboard presentation board and some color prints, you can really add a lot to your 1:6th display.


I don't think any of this is stuff that we all don't already know. I am not saying anything new here. I think we just sometimes are so focused on our models that we forget about the environment in which they are sitting. I know that I constantly struggle with this very thing. But enough about what I think. I want to hear what you all are thinking. So...check out the email update in the morning and then come back and post some comments here. We want to hear from everybody.


Until next time, Have a good one!

Over the next couple of days, the email DAILY UPDATE is going to be centered on a discussion of displays; in particular, ideas about the type of displays we want to do for Club Shows. As you all know, I have a lot of opinions and I am pretty vocal about most of them. I think it is very important though that we really put a lot of thought and planning into what each of us want to display and how we are going to go about it. Tomorrow's discussion in the email starts out with a look at how we want to do a large club diorama; is it a floor diorama? is it on tables? how many buildings are required to effectively get across the illusion of a larger city? How many vehicles, how many figures, etc, etc, etc.

I think it is important to plan. You all have already seen this drawing of my firebase concept.

Of course you have also seen the module in it's beginning stages and are aware of the fact that it doesn't look exactly like the plan because there were issues that came up during the building that I didn't anticipate. However, all of the features that I planned to incorporate in this drawing are in the actual module, even it it varies some in appearance. And I guess that is sort of my point, when we have a plan, we know where we are going, even when the road is rocky.


Example two;

Anyone who has ever seen a Haunted M5 story, has seen these buildings, but did you know that they started out as small scale drawings. My plan in building them was to have five buildings that could be set up in different patterns to create different parts of a city or town, or even a different town. I knew each building had to be a little bit different, but not so different that they would be instantly recognizable when they were meant to portray a different location than the last. So I started with rough drawings. And the result is seen below.

Well, that is all for this evening. Read the email UPDATE tomorrow and then feel free to post comments on both here.