To round out the current run of small scale scenery for coastal naval games I decided on a trio of islands, one of them with a lighthouse.
As with the rest of these small scale naval terrain pieces the base is .040/1mm styrene plastic card, bought in bulk from my local plastic supplier, with the edges shaped and sanded.
I forgot to take an unpainted/unplastered photo, and this one is blurry, but you get the idea. Cork for the island shapes on plastic card bases, then premix plaster for the beaches and to provide a bit of variety on some of the flat areas.
The basic structure was more quarter inch cork board, in larger pieces than I used for the rocks. I broke pieces of cork by hand and shaped the edges mostly with my fingernails.
The beaches are premixed patching plaster, applied with a wet sculpting tool and mostly smoothed with a wet fingertip. The concrete jetty on the mid-sized island is a little sliver of styrene plastic square rod.
Basecoats in progress – my usual blue-green ocean colour, black on the islands, sandy on the beaches.
The paint is my usual ocean scenery set – a blue-green for the water, Camel and Parchment for dark and light sand, and the rocks were drybrushed up from black with a dark grey, a pale grey, and finally pure white. The flattish areas of the islands that will eventually be flocked green were painted brown.
Painting all done. The largest island (lower right) is about 4″ x 3.5″, the midsize one (left) is about 3″ x 2.5″ max, and the small one (background) is about 2″ x 2.5″.
For drybrushing, incidentally, I highly recommend heading to your local dollar store/pound shop/etc and getting a set of cheap makeup brushes. They’re fantastic for drybrushing and available in a variety of sizes.
First coat of gloss varnish on the water parts. These wound up with three coats of gloss varnish before I was happy with the look, and then the usual treatment with gloss gel for waves and water texture.
The water got the usual treatment, several coats of gloss varnish with a minimum of 24hrs drying time between each coat, and then acrylic gloss gel for waves and water texture, as detailed in the previous articles in this series. After all the water stuff was thoroughly dry I attached the lighthouse with superglue and did a quick flocking job with two or three different flock mixes.
All three islands finished, flocked, and ready for the table. Really pleased with the wave patterns in the large bay of the largest island on the left.
A bit of a closeup of the large and lighthouse islands. Broken cork makes great rock formations and cliffs.All three islands from overhead. For scale, that wraith is on a 25m wide base and the 1/1200 RAF Beaufighter is on a 20mm W x 40mm L base.
These took a bit longer than I’d planned, due mostly to drying times of all the paint, water effects, and such, but they came out great and I look forward to them being a damned nuisance during 1/1200 naval games for many years to come!
After doing a pair of new sandbanks, I wanted to do something slightly different but still on the theme of “stuff to crash boats and ships into” and decided on a trio of rocky reef pieces.
As with the sandbars I started with a chunk of .040/1mm plastic sheet, cut it up into three roughly triangular pieces, and carved and sanded the edges down so they met the table smoothly. Then I took some scrap quarter inch cork board, the stuff cheap bulletin boards are made of, and broke it up into crumbs and small pieces for rocks.
Cork rocks glued down to plastic card. I just used ordinary white glue, nothing fancy.
It helps to remember that 1″ = 100 feet in 1/1200 scale, or 1mm = 4 feet in scale – so a rock big enough to seriously inconvenience a ship can still be just a few millimeters high! I wanted rocks and islets, not proper islands (those are coming!) so I kept most of the cork bits small, breaking it up with my fingernails as needed.
The bases got my usual blue-green ocean colour while the cork rocks got a black basecoat, and then successive drybrushes of grey-brown, pale grey, and finally just a bit of pure white.
Rocks after painting and drybrushing and a second coat of ocean colour. All ready for water effects!
As with the sandbars, I did two coats of gloss varnish over the water parts and then a thick layer of gloss gel for waves, pushed around with a really old brush.
Gloss varnish down.Gloss gel down and pushed around to make some lines of breakers and waves around the bases of the rocks.Finished rocks after the gloss gel has dried for several days, all ready to ruin the cunning plans of 1/1200 scale captains!
These were almost as quick to create as the sandbars, you use literally crumbs of cork for the rocks so one small piece of cork will go a long, long way, and they look good. I’m looking forward to seeing them on the table menacing players who forget that no matter how dangerous the enemy is, the sea is even more deadly and far, far more unforgiving!
As mentioned in the last post, I recently made a pair of new sandbars to give our boats and ships more stuff to run into during our games. I’ve done some before but this time I actually managed to get photos all the way through the process. So here’s my simple way of making sandbars or sand banks for naval gaming.
You will need:
card or plastic card. I’ve used 1mm/.040 sheet styrene/plastic card, which I buy in bulk 2’x3′ sheets from our local industrial plastic shop.
paint in your preferred sea colour. Mine is a blue-green.
a darker and lighter shade of sand for the actual sandbanks. I use Camel for the darker and Parchment for the lighter. If you wanted mudbanks instead of sand, you might want browner shades instead of tan colours.
(optional, see text) acrylic glaze medium. Gets a better gradient between sand and water than you’d otherwise get.
acrylic gloss varnish, for the wet look.
(optional) acrylic gloss gel for waves.
The paints and mediums I use. Salem Green for ocean, Camel for dark sand, Parchment for paler sand, acrylic gloss varnish and acrylic gloss gel for water effects. Not shown here, acrylic glaze medium for the beach/ocean transition painting.
I started by cutting two fairly random shapes out of an offcut of styrene plastic card I had around. Both these sandbars are about 6″ long and 3″ wide at the widest point. Carve the edges slightly irregular and sand them so they taper nicely down to table level. This is mostly why I use styrene plastic card so much, because unlike cardstock you can sand it.
I block out the sandbar shape with the darker sand paint, feathering the outer edges toward the water as I go. While that paint is still wet I laid down and blended in the brighter central paint to show the central, slightly higher, slightly drier parts of the sandbar. This is just quick and dirty wet blending with a wet brush, nothing fancy.
Sandbars with base colours all done, including wet blending paler sand into the centres of the sandbars where they’re higher and drier.
Adding the water colour around the edges, I also made sure to feather that into the sand to keep the edges irregular and natural looking.
After the base colours were dry I came back with the blue-green water colour, mixed 1:1:1 with glaze medium and water and went around the shoreline again to get more graduated colours where the water and sand meet. You can do this with thin washes without needing glaze medium, but the glaze medium gives you much more control and also slows down drying time so you have a bit more time to adjust things.
Thin glaze coat of blue-green water around the edges of the sandbars.
After this was all dry, it was time for a coat of gloss varnish over the whole thing. A word of warning about gloss varnish: make sure everything you’re putting varnish over is perfectly dry, and that includes the first coat if you’re doing multiple coats. Gloss varnish will crack and craze paint under it that is not yet perfectly dry and you’ll have to redo all your base coats and start from scratch – been there, done that, done the swearing!
First coat of gloss varnish down.
After the first coat of gloss was perfectly dry (see warning above!) I did a second coat mostly on the water and darker sand areas and then let that dry.
Second coat of gloss varnish down. Not a lot of difference in these photos, but the second coat looks dramatically glossier and more even in person than the first coat alone.
Finally, to add some waves and water texture I went round the edges of each piece with acrylic gloss gel. This goes on white but dries clear eventually. This stuff shrinks quite a lot so the trick is to build it up higher than you think is reasonable and then let it dry for a day or several. I use a really old paintbrush to shove it around, build up lines of waves, and otherwise manipulate it. In a larger scale than 1/1200 you might want to use clear acrylic caulk or something else to build up waves.
Gloss gel worked in around the edges for waves, applied thick as it will shrink down as it dries.
Gloss gel is easy to work with and makes great water textures, but it takes days and days and days to dry. Skip it for now if you need to get your scenery on the table in the next several days and come back to it later!
Once gloss gel finally dries, you get nice breakers and areas of disturbed water.
Two sandbars done and ready to complicate the lives and decision making processes of captains in future small boat games!
Coming soon, rocky reef hazards, small islands, and more shell bursts!
Went to our local municipal Remembrance Day ceremony in person this year, after two years of live streamed ceremonies watched from my computer, which was nice.
Also making time for some hobby this long weekend, starting with some scenery and bits to add interest to our 1/1200 coastal naval games. It is a truism of naval games that if you put any piece of scenery on the table, no matter how minor, some intrepid player will attempt to run their boat into it. Therefore, a new pair of sandbanks in progress to give players new stuff to run into!
Base colours done on a pair of sandbanks. Each is about 6″ long by 3″ wide at the maximum extent.
These are just simple shapes of .040″ (~1mm) plastic card with paint on them, two sand colours and the blue-green sea colour I’ve used on earlier naval scenery bits, and a bit of mindful brushwork and wet blending. I’ll do some glaze coats to blend the edges a bit more, then a couple of coats of gloss varnish and some gloss gel for waves and done.
In the background are some in-progress shell splashes. I’m not entirely happy with them at present but will put some more effort into them before making up my mind one way or another.
The shell splashes were directly inspired by Yarkshire Gamer’s rather nice photo/video tutorial over on their blog. He’s working in a larger scale (1/700 to my 1/1200) and with larger ships, but the basic technique is solid. I’m working with hot glue instead of clear caulking and of course wanting smaller shell splashes in a smaller scale, so adapting as I go. I have some ideas for making them work still, so we’ll see how that goes over the next few days.
I swear Bloody Miniatures chose their company name just so wargamer’s spouses could say that when the lovely figures show up! Thankfully they really are lovely figures, and if they amuse my wife too, then that’s a bonus.
Six packs of Bloody Miniatures – all of their Wave 4 Chorus of Disapproval and two packs from earlier releases.
A few weeks ago I ordered the whole of BM’s Wave 4, A Chorus of Disapproval, plus a couple of individual packs from Waves 2 and 3. They showed up this afternoon and I had to snap a few quick photos to show them off.
Wave 4 included the only armed female figures for the 17th Century that I’m aware of, which is awesome. There’s also a quartet of scouting dragoons skulking along, four armoured currassier on foot from the other end of the mounted troop spectrum, and finally four ordinary villagers with improvised weapons – axes and agricultural implements.
I also picked up a pack of sentries, and four looters hauling off their ill-gotten gains. Excellent character packs that I’m sure will show up in scenarios eventually! See the gallery below for some quick closeups of all six packs, straight from the box with zero cleanup.
Bloody Miniatures Gallant LadiesBloody Miniatures Night Watch sentriesBM Flying Piquets skulking dragoonsBM Unhorsed CurrassierBM LootersBM Village People armed civilians
Getting back into the 1/1200 WW2 boats a bit, had a refresher game of Germans attacking a British coastal convoy last week and I’m running a large-ish game in a couple of weeks at a convention over in Vancouver.
Reprinted turning arcs, Evading markers, moon markers (top right) and star shell diameter gauge for Coastal Patrol, all double sided for ease of use.
Naturally the prospect of a public game has me back at creating and upgrading my play aids. I’ve printed new turning circles for Coastal Patrol, tweaked my existing vessel status cards so they fit in plastic 3×4 card protectors, and have some new status tokens underway to make some things easier to track.
Turns out that 3″x4″ card protectors are actually designed for cards under 2.75″ tall, so I had to tweak my Coastal Patrol vessel info cards slightly to fit. Fully reusable status cards at long last!
The older naval markers, vessel cards, and such are all available in older posts here on my blog, and sometime in the next couple weeks I’ll clean up all the new and updated files and make them available here too.
I tripped over this little Kickstarter earlier in 2022 for a dozen figures inspired by European folklore, Folk Horrors by Ana Polanšćak. They’re very much “things that go bump in the night” weird horror miniatures and I decided to grab them while the KS was still running.
Image snagged from Kickstarter – the twelve miniatures included, all assembled and painted.
Some of them might be humans in costumes (might be!) and some of them really definitely… aren’t. I think I’ll be using these as plot point markers or similar for Pulp Alley-powered weird horror games, either in the not-quite-17th-C gunpowder homebrew setting I’ve been gradually putting together or more conventional early-20th-C pulp horror games. A good creepy alternative to the Cthuloid fishmen and such I already have!
All twelve figures laid out. The cutting mat is 1 inch/quarter-inch grid squares, for scale.
I’ll get this lot assembled, based, and primed over the next few weeks; painting should be pretty short and sweet if I follow the KS paint scheme!
The figures themselves are nice and clean, minimal mold lines and flash. I have some concerns about attaching the horns on some of the figures and the arms on the one “Bellman”, but thick gel superglue and tiny bit of greenstuff should work OK to keep everything in place!
All twelve figures based and assembled.The right half – the Bear far right, Death and the two Straw Children across the front, Roga, the Cow, and the Horse across the back, R to L.Left half – Ooser, Sixhorn, Horse, and Cow across the back L to R, the two Bellmen, Bezub, and the two Straw Children L to R across the front.
Unfortunately with the KS closed I have no idea where you might go to buy yourself these figures. Meridian Miniatures appears not to have their own website, just a fairly inactive Facebook page. Andrew May has a Patreon page and has run a bunch of other Kickstarters, but again, no info about post-KS ordering. Slightly odd – if anyone has links please let me know in comments!
Finally finished the sixteen English Civil War 28mm figures from Bloody Miniatures’ Release 1, The Company of Wolves. I did mine up a bit plainer than the painted examples on the company website, modelling them mostly after some of the county/semi-rural troops from the ECW with mostly plain grey/white jackets (unbleached, undyed wool cloth) or buff coats.
I ordered these back in March 2021 when these sixteen figures were the entirety of BM’s offerings; Releases 2 and 3 are now out, each sixteen figures in four packs of four, and Release 4 is due out sometime soon (September 2022, likely) and includes their first armed female figures!
The Company of Wolves has four figures with polearms, four dismounted cavalrymen, four pistoleers, and four with sword or sword & dagger. Scale-wise they’ve been deliberately designed to fit alongside Warlord, TAG, and Bicorne’s existing ECW figures and they do that very nicely.
Sculpting and casting are very clean, minimal mold lines or flash and no slipped molds or other casting errors.
Although I’d call my paint job workmanlike and table-ready rather than inspired, these are lovely figures, each one an individual with good levels of detail.
One thing that deserves special mention is how well the polearms fit into the open hands of their figures – open hands and weapon options are often a source of frustration and more of a nuisance than they’re worth with metal figures (and sometimes even with plastics!) but these four (sold as The Forlorn Hope) all fit their weapons and hands together amazingly well. No weird gaps around the hands/weapon hafts, no serious issues fitting them in place, and they look good without need gaps filled with greenstuff or other serious intervention! Nicely done to BM’s sculptor and caster on that front!
I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Release 4 mostly for the armed ladies, which basically nobody else makes for 17th C gaming, but I’ll be getting the full set of sixteen as everything Bloody Miniatures has done is well worth it. I will likely even go back and order their previous releases, even though I have more than enough ECW/TYW character figures for skirmish gaming!
It’s been a bit of an odd year for gaming, I’ve been having fairly regular games but not painting or building things on a consistent basis.
Obviously I’ve been very lax about updating the old blog but I have gotten a few bits and pieces done since the last update here at the end of February!
Gaslands buggy and dirtbike, from the plastic Implements of Carnage II set.
Sometime earlier this year I assembled and painted up this pair of little Gaslands vehicles, both from the North Star Implements of Carnage II plastic sprues. Both very cool Hot Wheels-scaled (20mm, nominally) little vehicles of a type that (unlike normal cars) you can’t easily get commercially.
Buggy and bike heading the other way.
By way of a mini review, I’d say buy Implements of Carnage II if you’ve already gotten into Gaslands, want the specific two vehicles on it, and probably already have the Implements of Carnage I set, which has lots of regular weapons, armour plates, and other bits that are more useful for converting Hot Wheels/Matchbox cars than what comes on the 2nd set!
There’s no instructions included with the sprues. The dirtbike is three pieces and goes together easily; the buggy is a bit more complicated but some test fitting should show you how it assembles. There’s two pieces of armour plate designed to go on either side that I’ve left off mine – they cover the sides of the roll cage either side of the driver.
More soon as I sort photos and try to get back into the swing of active gaming and blog posting!
Plague and megalomaniac idiot dictators waging unprovoked war on democracies and idiots honking in stupid pickup trucks… let us distract ourselves with some modelling instead, shall we?
The workbench this weekend. Based and mushrooms and plague monks and ECW and much else!
So what was, in fact, on the workbench this weekend? Starting on the lower left of the cutting mat, we have a batch of 25mm/1″ plastic bases with greenstuff cobbles added to the top, these eventually to have some “town watch” kitbashed figures on them – probably Warlord ECW pikemen bodies with Frostgrave parts for some arms.
Heading clockwise, we have some awesome Fenris Games mushrooms, the first I’ve finished from their massive Sporewood set from the 2021 Toadstool Brownie kickstarter. I’ve based four of them onto a chunk of scrap 1/8th plastic and will get that finished up soonish; the fifth mushroom painted is lying on the left there.
At the back of the cutting mat behind the Fenris-supplied “Love Miniatures Hate Fascism” stickers are sixteen Bloody Miniatures English Civil War chaps, their Company of Wolves bundle of their Wave One releases, also from early 2021. Really lovely figures, full of character. Bloody Miniatures has produced two more batches of sixteen since then and Wave Four is on the way; I’ve held off on buying Waves Two and Three because up until a few weeks ago Wave One was still all boxed up…
The five Fenris plague cultists, all set to lead ominous processions through a fantasy city.
Finally in the foreground we have five Fenris Games Plague Cultists all finished and ready to terrorize a table soon. Their bases were the test run for the urban bases off to the left there. I wanted grubby urban cobblestones and I think it worked. Nice simple figures full of character, too, and beautifully easy to paint up.
Hobby progress despite the state of the wider world, and that is never a bad thing. Stay safe, stay sane, and hobby onward!
