A Long Time Ago...

In a galaxy pretty darned nearby (this actual galaxy, to be frank) a child was born.

Happy Birthday to me. :)

Ruined walls

At the same time I was making the fences the other day, I was inevitably thinking of other barriers. I grabbed a few of the same tongue depressors and some foamcard, and got to work. First, I used the hot glue gun to secure the foamcard to the wood. Then I sliced off the layer of paper, and scribed bricks onto the foam. I wasn't going for great detail, as I wanted these to be really run-down-looking walls. I daubed some filler onto the whole, and glued sand to the wood. Once that was all fixed, I popped some dark brown paint on it, then dry-brushed in in gradually lighter tones. Even the lightest tone was still pretty dirty. Then a few colours of flock were added to the base, and Bob's your uncle.

Fences a la The Terrain Tutor

Fences

I already have something like twelve feet (3.6m) of fences for 28mm, so why make more? Well, simply put, because the ones Mel makes look a lot nicer than the ones I already had. Besides, who doesn't need 16 foot of model fencing? I can almost feel teh Battle of Farmville approaching.

How to make the fences

If you want to make something like this, I can do no better than direct you to the scenery wizard who inspired me, The Terrain Tutor. He's a top bloke, whose dream is to teach everyone how to make gorgeous terrain for their games. He has all sorts of tutorials on there. If you haven't checked him out already, do so now!

Here is the link to his Youtube channel.

Here is the link to his tutorial on fences.

Here's how mine turned out

Rusty Shipping Container

Now, this isn't my idea, so I shan't be telling you how to build this one. I just followed all the instructions given by Commissar Gamza on Youtube. If you want to make one of these, just do the same. Here's the link to the video. Here's how my version turned out.

Ancient Egyptian Tomb in 28mm

Sinister ruins from the age of the pharaohs - and Happy Six Hundredth Blog!

What lies in the darkness of the tomb? A king's ransom in precious metals and ancient artefacts or a vengeful mummy, wrested from his slumbers by odious graverobbers?

Construction

A nice simple little project here. Just a wee oblong bit of packaging, with foamcard glued to most of the sides, and a ruined entrance built up from offcuts. I peeled the paper off one side of the foamcard,  and scribed in details of stonework. I wanted it to look fairly imposing, so deliberately chose to make the stones look like large pieces. They aren't cyclopean, but they are pretty hefty. Once the piece was assembled, I gave it a coat of polyfilla over the stonework, and glued sand to the base.

Painting

A really simple bit of work again. I gave the piece a grey undercoat. You can see this in the recesses in the photographs, but in the flesh it's almost invisible. Then I applied a coat of some cream paint. Once that was dry I picked out the recesses in the stonework with diluted dark brown paint, and then gave the whole a drybrush of the dream mixed with the white. I'm very happy with how it came out.

Pound Store Vinyl Tiling Makes Great 15mm Stone Roadways

Vinyl Floor Tiles

As I said the other day, pound stores are an under-realised goldmine of assorted wargaming scenery. I spotted a pack of floor tiles in there the other day, and was thinking about using it for a river. More on that another day. What I noticed while cutting it up was the fine texture on the surface. Again, just in case your pound store has stuff in it that costs more than a pound (as mine weirdly does), these tiles come in a pack of four and that pack costs a quid. They are exactly 12" across (c.30.5cm), so it's easy to work out how many you'll need for a given project. They have a paper backing, which peels off to reveal an adhesive side. I recommend marking out your dimensions on the paper backing, and cutting them (carefully, naturally) with a knife rather than scissors.

Painting them up

I decided to just do a little test piece for now. So I nabbed a snippet, undercoated it with Halford's matte grey spraypaint, and then gave it a series of drybrushes. I prefer my stones not to be blankly grey, so atop the grey I drybrushed Citadel Dry Nurgling Green, then Citadel Layer Ushabti Bone, and very delicately Citadel Layer White Scar. Obviously, other colour combinations are available. This worked for me. As you can see, the wood effect on the sheet is rendered invisible by the grey undercoat.

Bob Dylan

I am pretty bewildered that people keep getting enraged about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Earlier I saw that the Grauniad was angry because Bob is a straight white male. It's difficult to cohere how I feel about such an accusation being levelled against a chap of Jewish ancestry, who changed his name to be accepted, and who later became an evangelical Christian.

However, I thrive on minutiae. So while the Guardian condemns for being insufficiently unusual, the Daily Telegraph scorns him for not being a dreadful writer. The prize should have gone to Philip Roth or Doris Lessing. Apparently. Because they are both so much better than Bob.

I remember Lessing being included in my GCSE English or perhaps A-level General Studies. She wrote something about pigeons. I bought a Roth book some years ago. He wrote masterfully; he described in detail a tedious situation. It was so dull, so lacking in interest, so bereft of any spark of value that I didn't even finish the first chapter. It's either sitting unread on my shelf or I gave it away. Sorry, recipient, I should have given you some Homer.

I am being unfair. The Telegraph actually says that "A culture that gives Bob Dylan a literature prize is a culture that nominates Donald Trump for president. It is a culture uninterested in qualifications and concerned only with satisfying raw emotional need."

The Daily Telegraph has said stupider things before. Anyone who read it back in 1997, and hasn't pretended to have forgotten, will remember their lie that all or most of the foxhounds in the UK would be slain when Tony Blair's piss-weak anti-hunting bill went through. That's a long time ago, though. Surely they have supported a cause recently which has blown up in their faces!

I write this from the United Kingdom, which was the fifth largest economy in the world before the recent Brexit vote. After the vote the UK became the sixth largest economy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/13/a-world-that-gives-bob-dylan-a-nobel-prize-is-a-world-that-nomin/

Great War Boardgame

 Tanks

I picked up both the main expansion for the Great War boardgame, which features male and female MkIVs and German A7Vs, as well as German artillery, and the Whippet expansion, which I'll go ahead and assume needs no explanation.

Artillery

In addition to the German artillery (105mm guns), I also picked up some British opposition (18pdrs). I'm easily amused, so having this gun in 28mm, 15mm and 6mm makes me smile. :D They come in the usual brown plastic for the Brits, and grey for the Germans. They have been undercoated in the following pictures.

Flames of War

Obviously, the primary reason for purchasing these models is to use them with the boardgame. However, my mate fancies getting into Flames of War's WWI expansion, and so I'll be working out how to use these guys for both systems before basing anybody. Obviously, in time I shall expand my collection beyond just the plastics so I have a broader range of poses - and some officers, too! Hopefully, in a few months, we'll get a game in.

The Simplest Wargaming Roads You Can Make

Pound stores are great

There's one of those pound stores near me, and they have all sort of goodies in them. All sorts of little cheap bits of stuff almost purpose-designed for the wargamer! The home-decorating-cum-DIY section of mine has cheap packs of disposable knives, glues, and today's groovy feature: black sandpaper.

Black sandpaper

Weirdly, not everything in my local pound store costs a pound, so to reassure you, this does. It's a pack of sixteen sheets of sandpaper with a variety of grits: 4 each of coarse, medium, fine and extra fine. The dimensions are 11 9/16" (27.8cm) by 9.1" (23.1cm). So for a pound, you could, if you were really efficient, cover an area of 111.2 by 92.4 cm, i.e. about a yard and a bit (a metre) a side.

Things you could do with black sandpaper

Make a modern road

The obvious thing to do with black sandpaper is to make modern (or far-future) tarmac roads. So grab yourself a ruler, pencil and scissors. Flip the sandpaper over, grab a vehicle, and decide what size you want your road to be, from motorway (highway, freeway, Autobahn, if you will) to sleepy country lane. Just measure out the width of the roads, and you can then cut the sheets up with scissors. Bob's your uncle. You can just lay it on the table, and it's good to go.

Make a city block or a town

Get yourself a bit of paper, and sketch out a rough plan with corners, straight sections, T-junctions and what have you. Save yourself hassle by grabbing your existing buildings, and using them when planning your (sub-)urban area.

Knocking it up a notch

Age your tarmac

The obvious thing to do is add a bit of weathering. Grab a brush you don't care about too much, and drybrush a spot of dark or medium grey onto the tarmac. Remember this is sandpaper, so it will pick up the paint very easily, so use a light touch.

 Add road markings

You can use what you have where you live or, if you'll be using this road for the future or SF settings, pick something totally different. White lines, yellow lines, red - down the middle of the road, at the edges. You can paint them on with a brush or use a stencil and spray them on.

 Base your roads

This sandpaper is cheap as anything, so if you choose not to base it, you won't really be losing out. That said, if you don't want to worry about the edges curling up or getting ragged, then you'll want to glue the sandpaper to a base. This will help keep it from getting damaged. Any basing material is fine. All I'd say is that if you haven't one this before, then do make a test piece first. The last thing you want, if you're trying to stop your roads from curling up over time, is to find out that your base is water soluble, and you've used diluted PVA, with the result that they curl up while drying.

Pavements 

If you're going to base the roads, you might want to add a pavement at the edges. This can also help protect the road from rough handling.

Road paraphernalia

Road signs, traffic lights, telegraph poles, bridges, railway crossings - there are all sorts of things you can do.

So what does this stuff look like? 

Here are a few pics of the pack I bought.

 
If you're wondering why this post looks so different, have a gander at this blog.

The Empire Needs You!

I was in Wales the other month, and chanced on a new gaming store in Swansea. Naturally, I couldn't resist picking up some Stormtroopers, though I managed to resist the siren song of Imperial Assault itself. It's just a matter of time before my resistance is crushed, mind you. They are lovely little models. A minimum of mould lines. It's a shame there is only the one pose, but when I get some more, it'll give me incentive to get out sharp implements to perform a spot of battlefield surgery. They aren't 28mm, as I had suspected (or known?), but are similar enough in size to the larger 28s that they can stand (in their crouched pose) beside them without too much bother.

In the comparison shots are a tall chap from Renegade's 28mm WWI range and a wee Scots officer from Musketeer's 25mm range. I undercoated the Stormies white, gave them a wash of that Nuln Oil black wash, dry-brushed the armour white again, and picked out the recessed details in black. The bases got a dark grey, and then the whole model received a gloss varnish, resulting in the floors resembling those of the Death Star. I did experiment with some ruddy shading for the eyes, but it hasn't worked. I must bear in mind that one needs greater contrast with little things.