Stop me if this is familiar. You’ve painted something incredibly grimdark, just dripping with menace and possibly wet rust effects. You go to take a picture and your background lets you down – rolling hills, sky, some old GW terrain. It works for your Space Marines, but it’s just not quite right for your Black Grail, is it? Well – Jon Hodgson of Handiwork games promises a solution, with the Trench Crusade Backdrops books, and with a sampler in hand I’ve put them to the test with the weirdest minis I could find.
Thanks to Annie of Bad Squiddo – the “Marketing Witch” for this Project – for sending the sampler over for review.
The concept for this product is simple – full colour art backgrounds for your model photos, used either to give them a bit more depth and beauty in standard model shots or to form the distance of diorama shots. With a Kickstarter up and running – and already smashing the total goal – and proven experience with delivery from several different forms of the Backdrop Book, a Trench Crusade themed one seems like a bit of a no-brainer. With art from Mike Franchina, Jon Hodgson and Paul Bourne, this one could be fantastic.
A Sampler of Trench Crusade
I was sent the sampler – eight pieces of art for Trench Crusade backgrounds out of a total of 32 in the finished Visions of War book, in the A4 size. What I got was certainly very nice – moody, atmospheric, and menacing pieces that suit a variety of different games. These ones are Trench Crusade enough without being absolutely tied to the setting, letting you use them for a lot of other gritty, grimdark – and possibly medieval – miniatures. They’re detailed enough to add visual interest without being overpowering or taking away from the miniatures – hinting at horrors as yet unseen.
There’s a good range of settings even within the eight of the sampler, with desolate wastelands, ruined cities, plague-struck churches and sinister shots of no-man’s land, all with a recognisably Trench Crusade feel in the sharpened ends of grave markers, flyblown grasses and looming crosses.
Using Backdrop Books
These work as you’d expect – pop them behind your miniature and take a photo. But they’re cleverer than simply putting a picture back there. Composition is careful – the central area where a model will stand fades into the background, perhaps with a vista of rolling hills or the hint of shattered buildings. Crosses, Spires, Churches and ruins frame that central area, so your mini will always stand out but stay firmly within the context of the image. I like that a lot!
You can take “normal” shots with these, subbing them in for your flat background of choice and they do a huge amount to elevate the interest of your shots, setting models into context and – the big draw for me – helping you to hide a potentially slightly off paint job a lot easier than a flat white or black backdrop will. Increasingly, I use the first book in this series to take all my photos – where the model will fit in, which is sad for my knights – preferring my minis to look like they’re in a relevant world/area rather than as pieces of plastic on a sheet.
There’s also a lot of promotional material about taking diorama shots with them – arranging scenery in both foreground and background to create a fully realised scene. I gave this a go and struggled a little to produce a good look – if you’re really interested in this, try out the A3 size rather than the A4 to give you more flexibility.
Overall
There’s a lot of fun to be had with these, and the full book promising 32 unique backdrops looks like it will span a vast range of visuals. As the sampler is quite a limited range – all similar to prior backdrop books in this series with a Trench Crusade twist, I can’t say for sure that they’ll feature the weirder, bloodier and more… trenchy? nonsense that suffuses Mike Franchina’s art in particular. As it is, I like this product and I think it’ll do well for those of you playing in the Grimdark, but the sample doesn’t feel uniquely Trench Crusade. There are other options in the Kickstarter – that I haven’t had the opportunity to play with – that do appear more exciting, a whole book of esoteric weirdness that plays right into everything I like about Trench Crusade, and probably suits my weirdly oil painted models a bit better.
Overall, from the sampler I can say this will hit the mark in providing the “instant epic” promised in the Kickstarter. Selecting the right backdrop for your models really does elevate them and lets you very quickly build up evocative and interesting scenes. If it really pulls off the full weirdness and horror of Trench Crusade is harder to say. If the remaining 24 images in the Visions of War book get weirder than those in the sampler, it will. As it is, it’s good – I’m looking forward to seeing if it becomes great.
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