Welcome to another Work in Progress Wednesday, as a complete contrast I’ll start this week with what I’ve been up to. Above you can see I finished my long dead warriors scatter terrain pieces, and below I have a re-discovered a Citadel Miniatures Viking from 1985 that I’ll be adding to my Viking Saga warband.
36 years old and still looking the part
Next up Mark has yet more 6mm units. Fist are some Roman infantry units.
Medium infantry ready to join the Roman army
Then we have some Hundred Years War Men at Arms and Longbowmen.
Hundred Years War English Men at Arms and Longbows
Finally from Mark a camp for his Greek 15mm army. This is a nice twist on the normal two tents and a wagon style camps we often see.
Camping at a ruined temple after a hard day on the battlefield
Next up Stephen has added to his Sci-Fi collection with a group of generic crew members.
More conversions for Stargrave
Marcus has been improving this years club game (technically last years game!) With more snowy terrain that will hopefully be ready to play at Broadside.
More Snowy Ground for Biggles!
And last but not least this week, Tony has continued painting his Lord of the Rings dwarf Grim Hammers.
Grim Hammers led by Bombur, who’s obviously spotted something to eat ahead of him
See you next Wednesday for another catch up with the club.
Bit of a bumper crop this week. Stephen has made progress on his hover Camper Van. Stephen has added luggage to the roof and undercoated it ready for the paint scheme.
What paint scheme will it be?
Next up Eric has painted up two fantasy miniatures. The first being a ranger miniature.
Old school feel to the Ranger
The second a warrior Eric will use for Warhammer fantasy or to add to a Dragon Rampant unit.
Flailing around?
Mark has gone back to his Hundred Years War army with the mass ranks of archers getting the painting treatment.
Hundred Years War archers
John has made progress on his Japanese buildings having added the thatched roof and wooden panels.
Japanese houses
And last but not least I’ve been looking at creating some terrain pieces to just act as battlefield dressing. Things that won’t have an effect in the game but break up the tabletop and set the scene. To start with I’m using some old Games Workshop skeletons as the fallen left behind after some ancient battle.
Jeremey takes us through a recent scratch build of an ancient Barrow, or should that be Cairn?
During the last few months I’ve started to build up my collection of terrain. Having a fantasy undead army I thought I’d have a go at building a burial mound of sorts.
As is my usual methodology when building terrain I created a number of rock shapes out of some EVA foam and stuck them together with the hot glue gun.
Stage 1 – the basic burial mound
The whole thing was then glued to a piece of thin wooden board, and then spray painted with grey primer. Unlike other polystyrene foams the EVA foam does not melt when sprayed.
Stage 2 – undercoated grey
I then had to decide what colour to paint the rocks. The temptation is always to go with grey but I try and avoid that. I chose to go with the brown/beige look.
Stage 3 – painting the individual rocks
The method I used was one I’d tried before when painting a dungeon. I used a few different shades of brown to give a variety to the mound.
Stage 4 – dry brushing
The next stage is to chose a light beige colour (bone, linen etc.) and to dry brush the whole thing. This dry brushing blends the different rock shades together, you can go lighter if desired. I did return to this later feeling that the dry brushing needed to be lighter.
Stage 5 – basing
Simple stage up next with painting the base brown. I always do my bases this way and then apply PVA glue before flocking.
Stage 6 – flocking
With the PVA glue applied I then sprinkled the flock on the base. I also stuck some flock to the rocks to give the impression it has been around for a while.
The finished burial mound
Here we have the finished burial mound, this was a simple piece of terrain to build. I was pleased with how the rock colours worked especially after applying another lighter dry brush.
On another club outing with Stargrave Jeremey ran a game set on the legendary planet of Fenris, with Stephen providing a dramatic write up of the game …
The game was set up in the ruins of a city with the robots of Fenris on patrol throughout the region. The crews of four ships arrive to search for loot.
The Robots of Fenris patrolling through the ruins
Each crew was given a random mission brief providing additional bonuses to be had based on those missions. Stephen ended up with a mission that allowed the crew to pick a rival crew and gain extra credits for any kills against that crew.
The Seedy Dive Space Bar
“100 Credits!? You gotta be kidding me. I want 200.” Kersh Wilson banged his fist on the table for emphasis.
His opposite number leaned forward. Only now did Kersh get an idea of his features in the half-light of the smoke-filled room – the flattened nose, the red skin and ritual scarring. Kersh was dealing with a Creduxian.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Kid,” said the Creduxian. “What I’ll do for you is make it 150 credits for a kill. Just 75 for a hit. Do we have a deal?”
Kersh leaned back, trying to recover his composure, remember the calm and measure he’d been taught as a young student by his masters.
“150 for a kill, huh? Yeah, OK – we got a deal.”
“Good. Good. I’ve made it easy for you. The hit’s name is Offler dZuk – she killed my kinsman. She’s a crew member on a ship called The Troubadour. The captain’s name is Ash de Vere. I’ve had one of my cronies slip Ash some information about some ruins on Fenris. Told him there was money to be made. So I’ve got ‘em off-planet for ya’, somewhere quiet, somewhere away from the eyes of the lawmen. Who knows, maybe you can make some extra loot out of it yourself…”
Kersh and his crew, as well as trying to collect loot tokens, had a special mission – extra money for taking an opposing player’s crew down to zero Health.
Fenris was an area of ruins and covered in undergrowth. Also present were some battle droids, so they’d have to take it careful. I had to choose which player I would have to try and shoot. It would have to be either Andy or Phil, as they were either side of me. I looked at where the loot tokens were and I reckoned that I was more likely to bump into Andy, so it would make sense to have him as my target since there was every chance we’d exchange gunfire anyway. Where I deployed there were two tokens that shouldn’t be too difficult to grab. I pretty much split my force in three – crew Captain Kersh Wilson (a mystic) led a couple of his crew after one token. Shoggoth (a biomorph), the first mate, led some crew after another. I had two raw recruits who I decided I’d send after the furthest away, but also with an eye on the possibility of taking a pop at Andy’s crew if the opportunity presented itself.
The Recruits sent out to scout the area
Oh yeah, I also had a pathfinder and used his extra speed to lead the way, draw any fire, see what droids were about etc.
I took the first token without too much difficulty. At that point Phil rolled a bad initiative roll (any roll of 4 or under meant a random droid would appear – Phil proved good at rolling low…) and a droid appeared near my crew. Kersh took out his lightsabre (sorry, ‘void blade’ *ahem*). The droid took a shot and Kersh deflected the shots with his blade. He then concentrated carefully and caused psionic flames to shoot from his hand and engulf the droid. Didn’t do too much. So he drew his blaster pistol and let off a couple of shots. Down went the droid.
Fire fight with a robot sentry
The two recruits – a robot called 2B-55 and a pale-skinned alien called Ronnock Crowder – advanced through the ruins. Not too far behind was Shoggoth and Yammet Lament, an ex-commando. TwoBee and Ronnock by-passed a loot token, leaving it for Shoggoth, and took position behind some ruins. Because on the opposite side of the road two of Andy’s crew could be seen trying to unlock a loot token.
Laying down some fire
Both TwoBee and Ronnock drew their pistols and started shooting. Down went one of Andy’s crew – Offler dZuk. She was only wounded, so on Andy’s activation he decided to pull her back. But TwoBee and Ronnock let rip again, and this time she wouldn’t get up – down to zero health. But was it a kill?
With three loot tokens, and having successfully completed their special mission, I decided discretion was the better part of valour and got my crew off with all their loot.
It had been a very successful first mission for Kersh and his crew.
Captain Kersh collects some loot
Or was it? The story will to Return to Fenris for a different perspective …
First up this week Eric has painted two more Stargrave crew members, I could be wrong but these have the look of cannon fodder.
Next up Andy continues to wade through more of his medieval miniatures, this time with some progress on horses.
Mark has made some 6mm progress with his Spanish Napoleonic era forces.
Two cavalry units, a mixture of heavy cavalry, dragoons, hussars.
Mark also sent us progress his son Felix has made on his first Imperial guardsman.
Warhammer 40K Imperial Guardsman
And lastly this week, with the shows starting again Marcus has turned his attention back to the clubs current (Last seen at Cavalier 2020!) show game, first up some Yeti’s.
Copplestone Yeti’s
and some snow scenery made out of expanding foam.
Expanding foam terrain
That’s it for this week, catch you next Wednesday.
Here we are with another selection of pictures from the club showing what we’ve up to. With the return of club meetings, projects are turning to the various games we have managed to start playing again.
First up Tony has been painting up some 15mm Brigadier characters, strangely enough from Brigade Models. He has also managed to complete another dwarf for his LOTR’s collection.
Kili the Dwarf
Next up I’ve been painting up some crates from the Mantic Dreadball range for use in various sci-fi games.
The selection of crates from the Dreadball Extreme box set
John has been painting up some 10mm Chilean and Peruvian Cavalry.
Regiments of Cavalry on the way
Lastly for this week Stephen has used up some old EM4 Colonial Marines miniatures and a bit of kit bashing to create some additional crew/gang members for use in games like Stargrave.
Effective bit of kit bashing to bring some old figure to life
Jeremey takes us through the various times club members have used actual toys for games.
Recently Tony posted pictures of a toy Millennium Falcon he bought for his current 15mm Star Wars project. This was a Hasbro Millennium Falcon toy measuring 9.5 inches x 7 inches.
Checking the toy for size
All Tony did to this toy was to give it a wash of black acrylic paint thinned with Johnson’s floor polish followed by a heavy light grey drybrush.
Picking out the details
As you can see the end results were quite impressive for such a simple technique.
When the Stargate rules came out Stephen decided to paint up a spaceship to act as scenery. Again going for a toy Stephen bought a strange looking spaceship from something called the Starlink range.
Starlink Neptune Ship
From what I can tell you can connect this toy up to a games console for added features. Stephen converted a few bits of the original toy to turn it into a craft for his bounty hunter.
This is the notorious bounty hunter, Boone Sadist, with his ship Scourge Reaper…
I also got in on the toy action a number of years ago for my Fenris Descending game. I dug out one of my old Star Wars toys, namely this PDT-8 transport toy.
The old Mini-Rig range dating back to the early 1980’s
For this I did need to cover over the compartments you put the action figures in and went for a complete paint job, but that was still just a simple primer of grey, dry brushed silver and a black ink wash applied.
The shuttle craft from Fenris Descending
Again the level of detail on the original toy made it a good choice to use for wargaming. You can often pick up such toys for a bargain price on Ebay or in the toy store clearance bin. A purpose built wargaming spaceship of the same size (although likely better detailed) would be quite expensive.
I can see my self doing this again if I spot the right toy.
We’re back for another look at progress from the club members.
Above we have Mark having painted old stoney face himself who is just about done, just the base to be completed. Also Mark has completed more of the Pontic army with some swordsmen.
Mark’s youngest has also been slapping on some paint (mainly contrast paints) to a block gang to go up against Dredd.
Start of a brightly coloured block gang
Next up I’ve been working on a piece of old wood I found to make a giant tree terrain piece.
The giant ancient tree 21cm tall and 7cm wide
The tree currently has a glossy finish because to help preserve the wood I applied a watered down coat of PVA glue.
Next up Tony has completed another dwarf to add to his ranks of LOTR’s miniatures.
Another dwarf in the war of the ring
Eric has also completed his Inquisitor Greyfax who will act as a Captain or first mate for Eric’s Stargrave crew.
Inquisitor Greyfax
And last but not least this week Stephen has made more progress on his Saracen army, this time some light Saracen cavalry.
Sometimes you have to admit your hobby space needs a good tidy. Jeremey takes us through his latest tidy attempt and subsequent creation.
If I spent as much time actually painting as I did tidying up my hobby desk I would have defeated the lead pile by now.
My current hobby desk is a 1940’s bureau I got from the local charity shop. It has a number of spaces for putting your letter writing paraphernalia, but plenty of potential for hobby related equipment.
I originally bought a couple of desk tidy/pen holders for my paint brushes, files and sculpting tools. They worked but as you can see there was a lot of wasted space in the desk.
The original desk tidy units
During the latest desk tidy session I suddenly hit on the idea of getting something that made better use of the desk spaces. I tried finding other pen style holders that would fit better but couldn’t find anything suitable.
Interlocking EVA foam floor mats
It was at that point I decided to make my own. I decided to make some boxes out of foam floor mats since the contents would not be that heavy and the desk tidy pieces themselves didn’t need to be too robust, just survive being pulled out like draws.
The finished boxes loaded with paintbrushes, files, sculpting tools, knives, cutters, basically everything I need at my finger tips
I started by making simple boxes and stuck them together using the hot glue gun. I measured the space available to ensure the boxes used up all the space available. Once that was done I got out all of the items I wanted to store and cut internal foam pieces (again stuck on with the hot glue gun) to create the various spaces for my equipment. The last thing was to add a handle so I could pull out the boxes.
The first one worked so well I made a second (slightly better than the first, shown on the left), which meant I could have on the desk even more equipment I’d previously put away in other draws. I’m now wondering if I can build myself a rack for my paint pots out of the foam!
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