Tag Archives: scenery

Historicals, Terrain

Second Russian House WiP

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Started another Russian farmhouse on Boxing Day evening, this one slightly bigger than the first at 4″x2″.

I mentioned in the previous article that I used coffee stir sticks for the wood siding. The workbench photo below should explain some of how I’ve been doing these buildings.

rushut2
Two WiP photos of Russian huts. See text for details, click for full size.

Basically, I split stir sticks lengthwise, then glue them along mattboard walls I’ve already cut the doors and windows out of. It’s easier to go back afterward and cut the stir sticks out of the openings than it is to premeasure! You can see one long side already trimmed above, and the other three sides waiting for trimming.

Incidentally, for this kind of trimming, I highly recommend an X-Acto #17 chisel blade instead of the classic scalpel blade (the #11 blade). Being able to cut straight down makes clean cuts in the windows easier, and it’s an easy way to trim thin wood and other strip materials.

The second photo of the pair above shows the new house with the walls assembled but no trim addded yet, and the first hut finished, except for the roof which is drying off-camera.

I’ve already assembled the thatch roof for the new building, and didn’t get any WiP photos of that, but I”ll try to get some progress photos of the next thatch roof I make, I promise. It is kind of difficult to smear glue everywhere and handle a camera, though…

Off for a week tomorrow, so see you all next year!

Historicals, Terrain

Night Before the Night Before…

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… and over at my place, I was hiding out, enjoying the last evening of solitary, productive peace and quiet I”ll have for a while, as the holiday season proper lands on us tomorrow.

In between beer, sending out festive email, and a little bit of painting on some White Russian troops, I cranked out this:

rcw_hut
A very small hut is investigated by a pair of Brigade Games 28mm Russian officers.

It’s tiny, only 2″ x 3″ – but I’ve always liked the philosophy of making your buildings a bit smaller but having more of them. A hamlet of four or six buildings looks more convincing as a hamlet than a pair of buildings taking up the same space on the wargaming table.

Construction is almost all mattboard, with the siding created from thin wooden coffee stir sticks split lengthwise. The roof is towel over a mattboard framework, and removable. There’s a door to glue into place as well.

The roof needs a lot more painting, which it might get on Boxing Day or else in the New Year, but I’m fairly happy with the greyish tone of the walls at this point. I might wind up rebuilding the roof, as I got a bit too enthusiastic with the scissors and haven’t left much in the way of eves over the walls. The simplest fix for that might just be to slap another layer of towel down over the existing one.

This little building was mostly a test of the wood siding idea, and of building the hipped roofs so typical of rural buildings in early 20th C Russia (and elsewhere, of course). They’re fussier, but this one works and so does the woodwork, so the new year should see a nice little Russian hamlet taking shape here.

Hope everyone has an excellent holiday season, however you celebrate it, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and such!

Historicals, Links, Pulp

Pulpish Links of Interest, 13 October 2011

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A miscelania of links, just so I get back into the habit of posting here!

Adventures of the 19XX is a pulptastic webcomic, full of zeppelins, giant airplanes, mystical oddness and villainy. Good fun, great art, and quite likely to inspire pulp gaming scenarios! (Warning: autoplaying music when the site loads…)

Need a World War One or Russian Civil War force? For the next 24hrs or so from the time I write this, Brigade Games has a great bulk deal, 7 packs for the price of 6, which works out amazingly cheap per figure. Nice figures, too — check out my White Russian riflemen from earlier this year.

If you’re looking for inspiration for Great War/WW1 terrain, check this amazing Lead Adventure Forum thread out – thejammedgatling’s First World War Terrain Boards – it’s a long thread of a project that’s been a year+ in the running so far, but well worth it.

Also via LAF, these amazing fake fur grasslands by Elledan. He’s got more on his blog, and also a small tutorial on his fake fur terrain. I badly want to do more fake fur terrain, done well it looks great!

I’ve finally got my painting bench set up again after moving at the end of September, so more original content should be landing on the Warbard shortly!

Terrain, Tutorials

Small Tools of Great Use

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sprayer
2oz spray bottle. Useful little thing.

Here’s something I bought largely on a whim from a local craft store that has proven unexpectedly useful. It’s a 2oz (60ml) sprayer, cost about $2, and I find all sorts of uses for it.

Filled (as it is here) with a dilute mixture of acrylic artists ink and water, it’s a highly controllable way of applying washes or stains to scenery projects. In this case it’s got a grungy-looking mix of green and brown inks in it as part of an ongoing experiment in making grassy fields from fake fur (more on the fake fur experiments in a future post!). Due to lack of bench space, I often put projects on an old plastic tray and work on them there; I can spray with this little sprayer without having overspray all over the tray and the table I’m working on.

When basing figures or adding texture to scenery, I’ll put sand or flock down, paint it if required, then once that’s all dry, do a second coat of heavily diluted white glue to really lock the scenery material in place. To get the glue to flow easily into and around the scenery material, I fill the sprayer with plain water with just a tiny dab of dish soap added. The soap destroys any surface tension in the water, making what’s known as “wet water”.

A quick spray of wet water gets a second coat of dilute white glue applied by eyedropper to flow nicely in and around the scenery material. Once it’s dry the flock/sand/whatever is pretty nearly bombproof. I’ve got figure bases a decade old done this way that still haven’t shed a noticable amount of flock.

You could probably spray dilute white glue directly with a sprayer like this, but it might also be a great way to clog the nozzle, and especially when basing figures, I don’t exactly want glue sprayed on them.

Got a favourite small or slightly odd tool? Share in the comments!

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Historicals, Pulp, Terrain

Half-Timber Barn WiP Part II: Thatched Roof

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Picked up a cheap towel to use as thatching. Here it is in a quickie late-night photograph, glue still wet on the roof of the half-timber barn.

thatchroofwip
Towel strips as thatch on the half-timber barn. As usual, click for full size.


The roof has a base of sheet styrene. I used white glue to stick the towel strips down, then more thinned white glue to soak the towel, which (when it eventually dries!) should solidify it nicely.

The barn has also been given a base of mattboard and mostly primed. My usual scenery primer is a 1:1 mix of white glue and black paint, mixed right on the model. It seals and protects the scenery surface nicely, even fairly fragile stuff like styrofoam toughens up a bit!

The main arched doors are also in progress, but I forgot to get a photo of them.

Still to-do for the roof, trim the edges and glue them under the eves for a more finished look, then paint and more paint. I also need to do basswood rafters under the roof, both for looks and for actual structural support, as the roof will still be removable when this building is finished.

The roof still looks a bit too towel-like right now, hopefully finishing the edges and painting will sort that!

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Historicals, Pulp, Terrain

Half-Timber Barn WiP

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Something for the English Civil War/Thirty Years War table, as well as for pulp games set in the quainter parts of the UK or Europe! All those crops gathered from my fields have to be stored somewhere, after all.

barn01
A stone-and-halftimber barn, work in progress. Click, as usual, for larger.

The whole thing is highly inspired by Warlord Game’s rather nice 16th Century Barn. Actually, scrub “highly inspired”, I’m outright copying the building, as a learning piece! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it?

The basic structure is foamcore. The stonework is soft foam salvaged from a takeout food container; I’m going to have to swing by our local (awesome) plastic supplier to see if they have something similar in sheets, as one takeout container at a time is a rather slow way to accumulate building materials! I scribed/carved the stones with a sharp pencil, and quite like how they’ve turned out.

The timbering is 1/8th x 1/16th inch balsa strip from the Stockpile’o’Doom. I have about six lengths of it, and it is entirely possible it’s leftovers from our family model railroading setup in the early/mid-1990s when I was in junior high. I think I’ve carried that balsa around long enough — time to put it to use, right?

Doors, additional timbering at the corners of the building, and a base are still to do. The inside will get a bit of plastering just for texture, and probably a lot of straw strewn around and such — details to add interest without getting much in the way, ideally.

The roof will be towel thatching over a styrene base.

I’ve heard the suggestion that you try one new-to-you technique per project; I’m afraid this simple-looking building breaks that “rule” good and proper! Foam stonework is new to me; likewise half-timbered building construction, and I’ve never actually used the towel-as-thatch technique before either! Wish me luck!

Terrain, Tutorials

Scenery: Plowed Fields

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First scenery project in quite a while, I’ve done lots of figure painting over the winter and spring but no scenery.

I pulled the top layer of paper off a sheet of corrugated cardboard and cut that up for the plowed parts, then used cardboard from an old shoebox for the base layers. There’s 4 6″x4″ fields and 1 larger 8″x6″ field.

The basecoat was a 1:1 mix of white glue and paint; the paint was a mix of two shades of brown, a shot of black and a bit of grey, just for variety. I squirt the glue and paint directly onto each field and mix with a 1.5″ housepainting brush, and transfer some of each field’s rough mix of paint to the other fields, so they’re all mostly the same colour without having to mix paint seperately in a container. The 1:1 paint and glue mix toughens and seals scenery nicely; it’s my usual primer coat for almost all scenery projects.

Paint still wet on two of the 4×6 fields.



After the basecoat was dry (and I’d patched a few bits I missed) I drybrushed with a lighter tan/brown shade, then flocked around the edges and onto some of the fields. The flocking was mostly Woodland Scenics ground foam, the dark green “Weeds” colour, and GW’s brighter green flock, with two other shades of green ground foam thrown in for variety.

Continue reading Scenery: Plowed Fields →
English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Historicals, Links, Misc

ECW Painting, Other Randomness for 28 May 2011

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An entire week since my last substantial post! The horror, how will our dedicated readership cope?

I’ve been painting up an English Civil War/Thirty Years War storm this week, filling that inevitable post-Lead Painters League void with 40-odd plastic pike-and-shotte foot and a dozen horse. You all saw 5 of the horse in one of my LPL entries, of course, the rest are taking shape nicely and all of the foot now have most of their basic paint on them. Sunday the 29th we’re running a 1000pt Field of Glory: Renaissance big battle, and I’m breaking one of my long-standing rules by fielding figures that aren’t even anywhere near finished just to get something on the table. At least they’re not straight-up Primered Legions — there are depths to which I will not stoop.

No pictures of my WiP paintjobs, but I’ll take the camera to tomorrow’s big game and try to get some reasonable shots to share here.

The Lead Adventure Forum is, of course, one of the greatest collections of creative wargaming minds I’m aware of. A random sampling of current coolness there that should be more widely known: Chicken Race on the Arumbaya, in which the estimable Hammers plans a pulpish steamboat race with a South American feel and some great-looking boats. Also, Boggler’s converted Improvised Back-of-Beyond Armoured Truck, very nice conversions of diecast toy trucks.

Elsewhere on the web (elseweb?) An Evil Giraffe has done his own versions of my riverbank pieces, and very nice they are too. He used broken cork sheet for his banks, so it has more texture (but also more height) than mine.

Finally, also via LAF but worthy of being mentioned on it’s own, Sarissa Precision have started selling a very, very nice looking line of 28mm laser-cut and -etched urban buildings that are perfect for pulp! Information here on the Sarissa site, and on sale here in their online store. I can’t wait to have some spare money to throw Sarissa’s way, the buildings are a good size (6″x4″ or 8″x6″ footprints and stackable for extra floors) and a fair price with enough detail to be interesting but not too fussy that they’re impractical. Hopefully at some point they offer their windows, doors and other details seperately, or even just the building fronts for those of us comfortable cutting our own side and rear walls.

Photos tomorrow or Monday of the ECW/TYW big-game madness, I promise!

Pulp, Terrain, Tutorials

Shoreline Part 2 (Sort of…)

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Found, buried in my harddrive, another couple of forgotten work-in-progress shots from the first round of shoreline/riverbank construction back in June 2009. The rest of the construction was written up last week.

shoreline wip1
Bare cardboard stage of construction of the first set of shoreline/riverbank pieces. Click for full size.
shoreline wip 2
Shoreline/riverbank beginning painting. Click for full size.
shoreline wip 3
Muddy brown paint on the banks, first coats of acrylic gloss varnish down on the water. Click for full size.
Pulp, Terrain, Tutorials

Shoreline or River Bank Terrain Pieces

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shoreline june 2009
Two feet of riverbank/shoreline, the original two from summer 2009. On the right, a 28mm hunter and a 28mm sabre-tooth tiger on a 20mm by 40mm base. Click for full-size image.


These riverbanks or shorelines made from picture-framing board (mattboard). I did the first set back in 2009 and another batch in the winter of 2010. They’re designed to form one edge of a playing board, especially on the 2’x2′ playing areas common to .45 Adventures. One of the really nice things about games like 45A that encourage smaller playing areas is that terrain projects become a whole lot more managable — no more having to crank out eight feet of river just to have enough to be usable on the table!
Each segment is 12″ (1 foot) long and 5″ deep, 4″ of river and 1″ of banks. The banks are the same mattboard as the rest, to keep them as low-profile as possible. The painting is black and two colours of blue, damp-blended right on the card. I tried to keep the edges mostly matched while painting the pieces. The water portions then got about six or so coats of acrylic gloss varnish so they looked like water. If I was going to paint them again, I’d do the water areas a greener shade with less black, as is often seen in murky jungle rivers.

riverbank with docks
The docks in place on the new riverbank section. Click for full-sized version.


In the winter of 2010 I added two new segments to the set, one another copy of the existing riverbank pieces, and the second incorporating a ramshackle wooden dock. The dock segment was wider than the others for most of the length, although obviously the same width at the ends. The docks were built up with baswood planks, with toothpicsk and bamboo skewers for the piilings. The large dock section is glued to the base; the three smaller sections are freestanding for flexibility.

riverbank, docks loose
The riverbank dock section, showing the freestanding dock segments. Click for full-size verison.

All four sections have been largely free of warping or damage, although the docks section does havea tendency to bow when stored. The eventual plan is to rebuild these riverbank sections in 2mm or 3mm MDF, using a bandsaw to cut the curves, but mattboard will do until then!

(these photos have been seen over on the Lead Adventure Forum and elsewhere previously, if you’re thinking they look a bit familiar…)