Tag Archives: terrain

Fantasy, Terrain

Building some modular fantasy city tiles

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For the past year I’ve been building some modular fantasy/medieval city tiles for our Sellswords and Guilders games. It has been a long process of building as I’ve chosen the hardest method possible – laying the cut foam stones individually. But I finally have a full 2′ x 2′ square of them done. The impetus this time was our local move into Mordheim and yet another competition – this time the quarterly painting competition on Bloodbeard’s Garage Discord, which had a theme of “unfinished”. Talk about the ultimate un never finished project!

Building the tiles

As with my other modular boards, these are all based on 3D printed Open Lock tiles. I then used my Proxxon hot wire cutter to cut a few different sizes of tiles. I tested two initially: 1/8″ and 1/4″. Ultimately, I liked the look of 1/8″ (as did my wife, but she thought it was nuts).

Test tiles for my modular city
First test tiles

I also made a 2nd change early on – for the sidewalk I moved from just 1/4″ cubes to a mixture of 1/2″ squares, 1/2″ by 1/4″ rectangles and 1/4″ cubes, always tessalated so that no two of the same touched fully on their long side.

Original style in the upper right, new style in the other pieces

After a lot of work, I had bits and pieces of a table, but certainly nothing enough for even a 3’x3′ (our standard board size). After a hiatus, I got moving again. I also switched glues – from standard PVA to Aleene’s Tacky, which sped up production. So I planned out my initial 2′ x 2′ planned out (well, sort of, I tweaked it almost immediately):

Initial layout
2nd layout
Final layout

One of the pieces I’m most proud of is the curved road section. I was (w)racking my brain to figure out how to make it look good, thinking I was going to have draw lines at angles, but then I realized I could just lay the stones outward from the inner curve.

Outer curbs laid
Fully laid
Painted but not yet dirty

And then, a few (a small number, really) of hours later, I was finished tiling:

Construction done

Painting

For painting, I started simple – a coat of craft black paint mixed with white glue (and a bit of wetting agent to make it flow better), and then airbrushed on some thinned Vallejo Black Surface Primer (a hateful paint if I’ve ever used one).

The first black primer, to tie to all together
Taping the edges prior to painting

I then re-watched RP Archive’s inspiring city tile video again and decided to follow his painting and weathering method as much as possible. I highly recommend it – it certainly inspired me in my project.

To start the colour, I airbrushed a neutral grey (Demco Artist acrylic) onto the cobblestones and linen (Folkart craft paint) onto the sidewalks. This is also when I noticed I’d left one 1″ x 3″ piece in the painting box. Oops.

Grey cobblestone base layer (with new tiles in the upper right)
Whole board painted

Next up I highlighted some of the cobblestones with a dark grey (Army Painter Gravelord Grey Speed Paint) and light grey (Reaper Paint Misty Grey mixed with a satin glazing medium). I wasn’t too fussed about painting exactly here – there were multiple additional layers of paint and weathering coming to hide any issues.

With highlighted cobblestones
Only cobblestones, not sidewalk, were highlighted

And then a white dry brush across the whole thing:

To finish off painting, I did a black-brown wash. Unlike RP Archive, I did it a bit heavier in pigment – 6 drops of carbon black, 3-4 of burnt umber and 3-4 of sepia in 50ml (all were Liquitex acrylic Inks). It took ~100ml to coat the full 2′ x 2′ board.

Washed tiles on the left, unwashed on the right

And then we get onto dirt. Here I also differed slightly from RP Archive. I had a dark brown grout, so I mixed it 50/50 with dirt, which I sieved with a 1/4″ chicken wire, then baked for a few hours and then sieved a second time in an old tea strainer. This left me with a very fine powder mixture of dirt/grout.

To apply the dirt, I tried the method he suggested in his video but found it didn’t work for me. So I changed it up:

  1. Sprinkle on dry
  2. Spray lightly with watered PVA + wetting agent
  3. Use my fingers to smear the damp mixture around the tile
  4. Dip my hand in water, thoroughly soak the tile
  5. Use a towel to clean off the tile
  6. Repeat 4 and 5 until I was happy with the level of dirt

I left a fair amount of dirt on the cobblestones, especially in the corners and in deeper pockets, and almost none on the sidewalk pieces. I found the grout and dirt dried almost instantly, so by the time I was finished all the tiles, they were dry enough to take outside and soak in watered PVA to seal them in. I’m going to have to do a 2nd coat, as some of the dirt is still a bit loose.

Comparing dirty (on left) with just painted (on right)
Very dirty process of dirty-ing up the tiles
Dirty tiles 1
Dirty tiles 2
Dirty tiles 3

Lastly, I had punched a bunch of leaves using an AliExpress leaf punch (non-affiliate link – I used the 05 colour). I dried some straight and soaked some in glycerin first, then dried. I found the glycerin ones were slightly translucent and showed the tile through them, so I’ll use them for something else (I’m going to try dyeing with inks and fabric dye next). Note that some of the colours were lost as they were dried, which was a bit unfortunate but expected.

Punching leaves from leaves.

I glued them down on the edges where leaves would naturally blow to, a truly finnicky process as the dried leaves were quite stiff. I tried soaking them in watered down PVA, but that didn’t seem to help – although I suspect I could rehydrate them by soaking them overnight. Some definitely will still lift (and have), but they are trivial to replace.

Leaves glued in the corners

Painting the Statues

For the statues, I painted them fairly simply. They were both on foam plinths or backgrounds. They were base-coated along with the tiles.

The bleeding eyes girl was quite simple – dry brush various greys on her and her plinth, along with some thinned greys for the streaks. Her eyes are painted with Reaper Fresh Blood.

For the Ganesh statue, I painted the statue itself with Reaper Old Bronze and then found Army Painter’s Verdigris Technical Paint, which I applied in a couple of coats. It works, but honestly this paint job is a bit simple and for larger statues I’d want to follow something like Garden of Hecate’s excellent tutorial. For the stone backing, I tried some stippling and washes, but ultimately went with sponged on greys and whites.

The Tree

The tree is fairly simple – a bunch of pipe-cleaners twisted up and then melted, with a texture paint (in my case, a DIY texture paste of brown paint + sawdust). It isn’t done, but eventually am going to try and match some of the look here:

Finished Look

And just like that, this 2′ x 2′ set of tiles was done.

The finished tiles

But of course, I need a lot more, especially if I want to get a full 4′ x 4′ Mordheim table done. So the next set is already underway:

Well, maybe not. The next set already underway, aided by Halloween candy.
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!
Galleries, Historicals, Terrain, WW2 Naval

Another Coastal Module

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I’ve finally finished another module for my 1/1200 scale coastal naval terrain. This is another 12″ long by 4″ deep piece with part of a reasonable size town on it, and has been sitting around for two years or possibly a bit longer, so it’s nice to get it finished and out of the way!

New coast module from one end, looking into the industrial part of town toward the church. Click for larger.

The buildings are all from Brigade Models’ Small Scale Scenics line, as always, and the boats and vehicles are 3d prints from Shapeways.

The other end, looking into the harbour & bridge and down the main street. The breakwater is a bit of sprue from plastic figures, which got me that nice round end and curve. Click for larger.

The construction is my standard setup, written about previously (see other related posts at the bottom or my naval scenery summary post) with a base of 1mm styrene sheet, a mix of materials for the basic ground forms, and a lot of different flocks for ground cover.

The Shapeways trucks, a small military convoy driving into town.
With a toothpick for scale.

The one thing I might still add is some more of the marvelous Shapeways vehicles here and there…

Left end, looking from seaward, mostly industrial.
The centre, looking over the old Martello tower toward the church and centre of town.
The harbour, stream, and bridge end.
The whole module from seaward.

I don’t have any immediate plans for more coastal modules… but I do have a lot more buildings and vehicles to put to use, and I was thinking that a coastal gun battery would be an interesting addition – the British coastal batteries seem to have had a pretty quiet war, mostly engaging aircraft, but the Allies reported regular engagements with German batteries especially along the occupied French coast… so maybe a half-length 6″ module with a bit of a headland, some gun pits, and a couple bunkers? We shall see…

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.

Historicals, Terrain, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

Small Scale Islands

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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.

The lighthouse on the middle sized island is Brigade Model’s Small Scale Scenics Beachy Head lighthouse. The real thing sits directly in the water, not on an island, but it’s a nice generic looking large lighthouse, regardless!

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!

Historicals, Terrain, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

Rocks vs Boats

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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!

Historicals, Terrain, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

Sandbars for Naval Gaming

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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!

Historicals, Links, Terrain, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

Remembrance Day Weekend, November 2022

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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.

Fantasy, Galleries, Terrain

A Trash Bash Tower

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A few days into January I had a fall that destroyed my glasses and injured my shoulder, both of which combined to cut down the amount of time I was able to spend on the computer. The upside of this, as I still needed something to do, was that I started a random construction project and completed it in about three weeks. (glasses have been replaced and shoulder is nicely on the mend, too)

Over the Christmas holidays I had painted up an entire village of really cool Toadstool Brownies from Fenris Games (they’ll get their own post soon) so I decided to trash bash a multi-story tower for them to cause trouble from, a sort of weird fantasy cross between a fortified tower house and a tenement apartment building.

I started with a medium size paper coffee cup from a widely available but deeply mediocre coffee chain, glued that to a scrap of 1/8th PVC sheet a bit bigger than my hand, then started adding details with scrap cardstock, wood coffee stir sticks, bits of styrofoam, paper, and Milliput.

Very early in construction.
Very early construction, with Toadstool Brownie on 20mm wide base for scale.
Details going on.
Shutters in place.
Textured with thin plaster and priming started.
Paint started, roofs and chimney details done.
The skinny chimney on the left is Milliput around a toothpick core, for strength. Nicely gamer-proof, I hope!
More paint. I used all sorts of random washes and drybrushing to add texture and character.
More paint. Lasercut window and plastic skull above it.
Paint on the shutters.
The big chimney.
Finished tower, view of the main roof.
Finished tower, skull window side/back.
Finished tower to the right of the door and ramp.
Finished tower, door, ramp, and garden.
The “back garden”.
The front garden, and yes those are skulls…
The Toadstool Brownie Tower, construction and finished photos!

This hasn’t actually graced a table yet, but I’m sure it will soon, and I want to write up stats for the Toadstool Brownies as either playable characters or random on-table nuisances for the games we play!

I haven’t done a pure stratchbuild like this in a while, but really want to do more, and weird fantasy builds are SO much fun!

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

An entry for Lead Adventure’s Build Something Competition 2022 – a farm!

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Each year Lead Adventure forum runs a Build Something Competition, each with a theme. Brian and I have participated 5 times at various points in the past years. So with 2022 here, I figured it was my time again.

Continue reading An entry for Lead Adventure’s Build Something Competition 2022 – a farm! →