Category Archives: Inspiration

Posts that potentially inspire gaming, terrain or other projects. Period photos or graphics, amazing gaming creativity elsewhere, and such.

Fantasy, Inspiration

The Workbench This Weekend, 23 July 2024

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This weekend I have mostly been raising the dead! A while ago Corey and I split two boxes of Northstar Oathmark skeletons and revenants and I’ve finally got all of mine assembled. We’d previously split another box of skeletons, so this gives me a good size horde of angry undead and when combined with Corey’s (eventual) horde it will grow to truly terrifying size!

The Oathmark plastic figures are nicely proportioned, clean sculpts, and clean casts. I mixed some GW skull box and Frostgrave extras into a few figures for variety, and then used some leftover bits to create more weird undead constructs!

Three regular skeletons and a necromantic construct mixing two Oathmark skeleton bodies, a bunch of limbs, and some GW skull box skullz.
First five revenants, all straight from the Oathmark box.
The large necromatic construct in all it’s weird shambling multi-limbed glory! I don’t have particular rules in mind for this thing, I just wanted to build something cool and weird. We’ll house-rule it once it hits the table.
Necromatic construct from another side.
Left, a necromatic totem of some sort – broken weapons and skulls. The other two bases I’m calling “scuttlers” – little necromatic constructs of spare limbs and skulls. Scouts and messengers for an undead force, maybe? Weird little dungeon nuisances? Both?
An in-progress photo of the horde, before finishing the last couple sprues of skeletons and revenants or the scuttlers. The ghoul is a Games Workshop freebie from earlier this year, and really quite a cool little figure.
The final horde!

Total score is thirteen skeletons (surely a lucky number for the undead!), fifteen revenants, five scuttlers, one large necromatic construct, one ghoul, and one necromatic totem/midden terrain piece or objective. And enough leftover bits to make more scuttlers and more totems, if I want.

Finishing up the bases with greenstuff is next, then primer and paint. I did up the previous batch of skeletons in a fairly simple paint scheme which I’ll be copying for these skeletons, and I’ll do something similar but not quite identical for the revenants – thinking they need some purple or green to set them off against the black/red/bronze theme of the skeletons.

After that I clearly need a necromancer and his immediate entourage to command this horde! No concrete plans for that yet but we shall see…

Historicals, Inspiration, Terrain, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

Links of Interest, 4 January 2024

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First Links of Interest of 2024!

Messing about with photo-etch (PE) parts? A bender seems like a useful thing, and happily there’s a Youtube build of a home-made PE parts bender from fairly common parts.

North Star are an awesome miniatures company who do all sorts of cool stuff, and among them is their North Star Magazine which is completely free and stuffed with awesomely well photographed painting articles by Kev Dallimore, an amazing and awesomely experienced pro painter.

In the tutorials line, Handiwork Games out of the UK have a nice pair of articles on making a simple terrain plinth for miniature photography. Part One is here, and Part Two goes into flocking and detailing.

Finally, for fun and for some period colour in our coastal naval games, this short British Pathe clip from 1943 on the RN’s Motor Torpedo Boats, also embedded below.

MTB in 1943 courtesy of British Pathe footage. Their channel has a bunch of clips like this, well worth looking up!
Historicals, Inspiration, Links, WW2 Naval

Links of Interest, November 23 2023

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In the course of adding masts and other details to ships earlier this year, I collected some useful links on various WW2 ships, and leaned hard on the work of some of the amazingly talented ship modellers out there.

T2 Tanker display model; The Model Shipwright large-scale T2 tanker original plans; really nice display model of a small WW1-era freighter

The Historic Naval Ships Association’s collection of WW2 recognition and target ID manuals (not PDF, unfortunately, but nicely HTML’ized) is worth a look, as is the rest of their huge online library – check out the grey menu down the right hand side for all sorts of mostly-WW2 manuals, publications, and plans.

Meanwhile over on the gloriously named Last Stand on Zombie Island, a really cool article on how navies made smoke (deliberately). Lots of other cool WW1 to WW2 naval stuff over there too, well worth a look.

I know I’ve linked to Boom & Zoom Graphics before, but their basic guide to the paint schemes and markings of common WW2 aircraft is nice and clear and worth bookmarking.

Historicals, Inspiration, Terrain, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

Naval Scenery Articles To Date

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Last Update: 29 December 2023, Resources section with Shapeways link.

Here’s all of my posts on 1/1200 coastal naval scenery so far… I’ll try to remember to add to this post as I create future articles!

Sandbars, Sandbanks, etc

Rocks vs Boats

Actual Islands

…and from 2020 when I started doing coastal naval as a scale and genre, the posts on my 12″ x 4″ coast modules, and painting Brigade’s Small Scale Scenery buildings.

Small Buildings & Tiny Ships (Part One)

Small Buildings & Tiny Ships (Part Two)

Small Buildings & Tiny Ships (Part Three)

A Headland for Tiny Ships

Coastline Complete

Fifty (or so) Tiny Buildings

One more coastal module, this one featuring part of a larger town, finished December 2023.

Another Coastal Module

The December 2023 coastal module. Click for larger.

Resources

All my buildings so far are from Brigade Models Small Scale Scenery range.

I did a Shapeways order in August 2020 for a whole bunch of 3d printed 1/1200 scale stuff and am slowly using up those vehicles and such in various projects. I maintain a 1/1200 WW2 Useful Things list with current links, if you’re interested.

Fantasy, Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Terrain, WW2 Naval

Links of Interest, 11 August 2021

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Quiet around here as I’m not doing a lot of gaming, painting, or terrain building this summer. Too busy with other things! I did have a couple of fantastic games of WW2 coastal forces earlier in August, and will get those photos up here in the next little while.

I recently got a well-stuffed box of awesome stuff from Fenris Games as part of their Toadstool Brownies Kickstarter, including whole forests full of mushrooms and some really neat tiny brownie and kobold figures. I’ll get some more photos of those and get some sort of review up soon-ish.

On to links… over on Empire of Ghosts we have some rather nice small scale islands in two styles, one tropical for Caribbean/the Med and one more northerly for the North Sea. They’re nominally 6mm or 1/300 to match the Warlord Cruel Seas boats and others, but as designed they’re pretty scale-neutral and the basic ideas will serve for even smaller scales too.

My excellent local game store started carrying UV resin and I picked some up a while ago, intending to try it out for windows in various buildings. Usefully, I just found this tutorial on using UV resin for windows over on the Comm Guild blog, which should prove useful when I finally get around to finishing the MDF church I started a few years ago.

More content here as the summer comes to an end in a month or so, I promise!

Historicals, Inspiration, WW2 Naval

New Books for the Library

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Went on a bit of a book buying spree recently in aid of getting more background material for my WW2 coastal naval gaming; among the classic references in the field are the trilogy of books published in the 1990s by Leonard C. Reynolds, Dog Boats at War, Mediterranean MTBs At War, and Home Waters MTBs & MGBs at War. Except for Dog Boats, they’ve been out of print ever since.

I looked through a few different used book websites and eventually wound up getting all three through different ABE Books sellers, despite my standing desire not to funnel money toward noted sociopath Jeff fuckin’ Bezos.

  • Gunboats in the Med.
  • Gunboats at home.
  • Fairmile D “Dog Boats”, and the three Osprey.
My recent book haul on the subject of WW2 coastal naval gaming.

I also picked up three Osprey books on the same subject, because one of the ABE resellers is also a full-service new book store as well and Ospreys are usually worth it. Those were E-Boat VS MTB, German E-boats 1939-45, and British Motor Torpedo Boat 1939-45.

If you’re looking for reading material on the coastal forces of WW2, I highly recommend the Publications page of Spitfires of the Sea, and the rest of that website while you’re at it. It’s written by Stephen Fisher, an archeologist/historian specializing in 20th C naval matters. He also tweets as @SeaSpitfires and is well worth following there.

Gaslands, Inspiration, Links, Painting, Tutorials

Links of Interest, 4 April 2021

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Cement Saul is a fairly new YouTube channel that has been doing a bunch of interesting Gaslands-related videos. I especially like the video on Weathering with Coloured Pencils and Pigments. Pigments (pastel chalk dust, or similar) are familiar to me and I’ve used them in the past, but weathering with actual coloured pencils hadn’t occured to me and I’m going to have to try that out! It’s part of a series on painting, stencilling, detailing, and weathering cars that’s well done, approachable, and worth your time.

Light Industries is a Canadian outfit that do various decals including custom work; I always like to find Canadian sources for things when I can!

Misc Minis do various decals as well, including tiny decals suitable for 1/1200 vessels or aircraft. I contacted him back in January 2021 about getting a little sheet of his smallest decals, got it in just a few weeks for much less money than I was expecting, and will do a proper review of them sometime soon!

Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Painting, WW2 Naval

Links of Interest, 10 March 2021

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A scattering of links for our first Links of Interest of 2021!

More possible sources of small scale scenery are always welcome, and over on Wargaming3d Wozname has started a new line of 3d printable STL files for 1/1200 scenery, starting with a few entire islands and some castles. Really neat to see people doing entire pieces in these tiny scales that would be basically impossible to do in any larger scale!

On the small scale naval gaming theme, the Society of Twentieth Century Wargamers has a couple of articles on small boat actions in the Mediterranean in WW2, with one article on mostly focusing on British vs Axis and the second spotlighting American PT boats. They’re framed around Cruel Seas but trivially easy to adapt to other rule sets.

Reaper Minis hosted a Virtual Reaper Con last weekend, and while I’d initially signed up for four classes on various painting topics, the world conspired to only allow me to attend one class, a fantastic discussion of “Additives, Mediums, and Texture Pastes – Oh My!” by Rhonda “Wren” Bender, talking about matt and gloss mediums, flow aids, drying extenders, glaze medium, texture pastes, and various other things as they apply to miniature painting. The class handout is available at the link above, the session was recorded and will eventually show up on Reaper’s YouTube channel, and Rhonda has a great website of her own over at Bird With A Brush that’s well worth checking out.

Incidentally, the anchor chain stock photo being used as a header for these Links of Interest posts is by CastleLight from Pixabay.

Fantasy, Historicals, Inspiration, Terrain, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

More Small Scale Scenery Inspiration

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There aren’t a lot of small scale scenery tutorials out there, either as videos or traditional blog post writeups. Viv on RubbishInRubbishOut, though, did some YouTube videos of Dystopian Wars scenery a few years ago, and it turns out that DW is in something approximating 1/1200 scale, more or less.

Table intro, part one of four.

Dystopian Wars table intro, painting & finishing the table, islands part one, and finally islands part two.

Also, Dispatches from the Front has been working on some fantasy naval scenery for Man’O’War using the Brigade Models buildings and it looks fantastic. Fantasy microscale terrain has a definite appeal, you can get grandiose epic terrain on the table that wouldn’t work at all in any larger scale!

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Terrain, WW2 Naval

Links of Interest, 1 July 2020

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For this Canada Day in a time of pestilence abroad in the land, the usual mix of individual links and items that don’t quite warrant an entire freestanding post, as is an irregular feature of this blog.

Curt of the always-awsome Analogue Hobbies blog has been doing 2mm Napoleonics at a really high standard, including gorgeously painted tiny renditions of the various buildings made famous by the Battle of Waterloo. He’s previously posted about his 2mm Nap armies, as well.

I am getting more and more tempted to do either Russian Civil War or 17th C English Civil War in 2mm… to which end I recently bought the Forward March 2mm Library and might need to get some things 3d printed for me. I quite like the thought of a single print bed of bases being an entire army, and I’ve always liked the “miles of battlefield all at once” look of small scale gaming even though I’ve done nothing smaller than 15mm (and far more 28mm than anything else) for many years now.

Rather nice little tutorial on doing bog or fen areas easily with patterned clear plastic sheet over on Lead Legionaries. This is a terrain type I’ve been meaning to do for several years now but it’s still somewhere on the endless to-do list.

On the WW2 naval gaming side, which I want to get back to sometime soon, I recently discovered the nicely laid out german-navy.de which has good short articles and illustrations of nearly everything the WW2 Kreigsmarine built or planned to build, from the workaday utility boats like the well known R-boote to the insane jet-powered hydrofoil they were dreaming of far too late in the war to actually matter. (German military designers spent the entire war hopped up on the Very Best Drugs, you can’t convince me that isn’t true!) If you have found a similar resource for other WW2 navies (especially the Royal Navy) I’d love to know about it.

Happy Canada Day if you happen to be Canadian, Happy (upcoming) Independence Day if you’re American, and hope July is good to you regardless of where you’re reading this from!