Merry Christmas 2015

EDIT 27.02.16: Did some minor modifications on the background and lineart.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Another greeting card I made for my reenactment group, "Traditia Militara" .

This drawing depicts a scene from December 1915, when Romania was still neutral, but gearing up for it's eventual entry in WW1.  It is placed at one of the hastily built defensive positions in the Rucăr-Bran Pass, which consisted of two rows of trenches with barbed wire entanglements supported by four 5.3cm Fahrpanzer turrets taken form the Focsani-Namoloasa-Galati fortified line.

The turret itself is the latest incarnation of the 5.3 Fahrpanzer, the Md.1892 turret.

The soldiers themselves belong to the 1st Border Guard Regiment and are wearing the M.1912 green-grey uniform and Prussian style Pickelhaube with the badge of King Carol the Ist on the forehead and Romanian roundels on the sides.
This particular style of headdress was worn by the Border Guards and the Gendarmes as an homage to King Carol (Karl), who belonged to the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen branch of the German House of Hohenzollern.

Both the helmet and the uniform were eventually phased out and replaced with the new M.1916 neutral grey uniform and the traditional "capela" cloth cap of the Romanian Army (which was then further replaced by the French "Adrian" helmet in early 1917), because of supply issues - the helmet was manufactured in Germany and the uniform used dyes imported from Austria-Hungary, and both those countries were soon to be enemies. However, both the uniform and helmet remained in use to the end of 1915.

I chose to draw the 1st Border Guard regiment because it is one of the units reenacted by my group and their HQ was located some 30km away in Sinaia, even though by the time of Romania's entry into WW1 in August 1916 the position was actually defended by the  22nd Infantry Division and the 1st Border Guard Regiment saw action further west, in the Turnu Rosu Pass.

I based my drawing on a few period photographs - one showing a few German soldiers around a similar Fahrpanzer somewhere in Galicia and a few others depicting the "Rucar-Podul Dambovitei" position after it's eventual conquest by the Central Powers, in October 1916.

Unlike previous drawings which either used photo references or were completely freehand, for this one the character poses were done in Terawell's Design Doll, a pretty nifty software which saved me a lot of time. I used the free version, which is pretty limited, but it does the job.

Also, since I wanted the background to represent a specific place, I used Google Earth 3d terrain to give me the required point of view.