Hi, my name is Garth Reinhardt and I live in Summerville, South Carolina.
I’m glad to now be a part of this forum. I have been interested in Military vehicles since I was a child but have recently become even more interested in them. I do sculpting for 3D printing as a hobby and a few years ago I started doing historically accurate cartoon tanks. I have since expanded out into many other types of WW2 era vehicles, (all in cartoon format). Drawing a vehicle is fairly straight forward but doing that same vehicle as a cartoon can be a challenge.
I spend a lot of time looking for good reference pictures, and my searches have frequently brought me to this forum. This is the place to go when I need to know what some obscure widget is and what it does. I am more of an Engineer than an Artist, so it helps me a lot to understand what I am drawing actually does and how it does it.
I am retired from the military but did my time in light Infantry and special ops units, so I have limited personal experience with armored vehicles. Because of this I rely on the knowledge of others a lot who are more of a subject matter expert than I am. Getting other people's opinions on what I am doing is helpful since it’s very easy for me to get tunnel vision when I am working on something.
I try to keep the level of cartooning consistent across all of my models, but this is not always as easy as you would think. When you change the size and proportions of things to cartoon them it changes things a lot. I have to choose between various features of a vehicle since I always have less physical room to work with than on the real version of it. I am constantly playing a balancing game between historical accuracy and cartoon distortions.
These are some pictures of stuff I have done already.