Sheperd Paine and the World of Military Miniatures
PUBLISHED BY SCHIFFER BOOKS, NOVEMBER 2008
Most of us are familiar with the hobby of model railroading, or perhaps we spent time as kids building scale plastic replicas of airplanes and armored vehicles. Sheperd Paine is arguably the best-known military miniaturist in the world, and he did more than anyone else to elevate modeling to the level of an art form—one that includes elements of painting, sculpting, historical research, and vivid storytelling. With an impressively broad scope of interest ranging from the Napoleonic era to World War II, and from creating a three-dimensional rendition of a work by Rembrandt to crafting fantasy scenes that do Frank Frazetta and J.R.R. Tolkien proud, Paine created incredibly detailed and masterfully rendered figures, vignettes, and dioramas that were eagerly sought by prestigious collectors such as Malcolm Forbes and Andrew Wyeth. And in the process, he inspired thousands of others to try their hand.
Coming from Schiffer Books in the Spring of 2008, Sheperd Paine: The Life and Work of a Master Modeler and Military Historian is the first book to examine all of this remarkable artist’s modeling work in the same pages, cataloging it via more than five hundred beautiful color photographs, and charting the life experiences that informed it in a conversational format inspired by another book about a great artist and storyteller, Hitchcock/Truffaut, François Truffaut’s portrait in interview form of director Alfred Hitchcock.
Jim DeRogatis Profiles Shep in the Sun-Times
Jim DeRogatis’s Military Miniatures
The Military Miniatures Society of Illinois
Jim DeRogatis with Sheperd Paine, 2007 (Photo by Marty Perez)