We start this week with a wonderful piece of work from Eric. This is apparently Wulfric The Wanderer in all his glory.
Another view of Wulfric
Next up John has made progress on his Japanese houses.
Andy is next up having finished some of his 10mm Polish. There a lot more colourful than I imagined they would be.
Meanwhile Stephen has finished his skeleton cavalry and added a bolt thrower.
A rare treat for me this week, I’ve finally made a start on the last of my trees. These were from a store called ‘The Works’. Every year they have various sized christmas trees available very cheaply.
They come covered in snow and so following recommendations from other club members I sprayed them green.
Tony has also been working on some trees from ‘The Works’, but he still has the snow on his.
But Tony has also painted up a bear miniature to act as Beorn for his Lord of the Rings armies. Here Beorn is with the finished versions of Deorwine we saw in a previous WIP Wednesday.
Back to Wednesday after a slight hiccup last week.
First up we have an undead dragon from Stephen and below the start of some undead cavalry.
Next up Marcus has started on another toy sub model for his underwater adventures.
Next up Tony has painted yet another Lord of the Rings miniature. This time Déorwine, Chief of the King’s Knights and a sneaky addition of the Brigadier miniature from Brigade Models.
Now we turn to the progress Andy has made on his Polish forces.
And an assortment of Dwarves and Vikings.
Lastly for this week, John has returned to building some more Japanese houses.
It’s been a quiet week at the society but we have a couple of things being worked on.
Above we have some more Chaos Marauders from Eric and below an interesting start to what is apparently a Games Workshop Culexis Assassin.
Next up I’ve finally made some more progress on my Napoleonic balloon project. Managed to get the netting onto four more balloons. Only five more to go!
And finally for this week, Marcus has added some foliage for his underwater games with some aquarium plants.
Welcome to another Wednesday and a selection of what the society members have been working on.
First up above Tony has some interesting looking miniatures. They are actually Chaos Screamers from Games Workshop, but we agree with Tony that they make good alien space monsters.
Next up Mark has made a bit more progress on his cold war brits.
While Felix has been busy painting up the figure given out at the last Salute wargames show.
And he’s also been painting up some 6mm dark age picts. Nice use of colour on these.
And lastly this week, Marcus has finished some of his WWII planes. Here we have a selection of Spitfires and ME109’s.
Last year, as a bit of a lock-down#2 project, I decided to make a small desert village for 6mm sci-fi games. All of the components come from Brigade Models (quick disclaimer here – I’m one of the owners of said company) but the techniques would work with any other manufacturer’s buildings. The wall pieces were taken from the Town Walls range, while the buildings are mostly from the Desert Outlands set. The photos in this post are all thumbnails – click on them for larger versions.
The first decision to make was how large it was going to be; I decided that it would have to fit in a 4l Really Useful Box, which gave me a maximum of a 348x220mm footprint and a height limit of 68mm. I based it on a sheet of Foamex, which is great for terrain projects as it doesn’t warp like MDF or hardboard when you apply paint. This came in 300x200mm sheets, so one of those did the job nicely.
I spent a while laying out wall pieces until I had a configuration that I liked – I wanted to avoid a simple rectangular wall. I positioned a gateway and sanded down the base at that point so it sloped away, and added a pair of watchtower pieces to the walls. Once I was happy with this I glued them down with a clear glue (Uhu). I smeared some wall filler around the joins to fill in the odd gap, this has a similar texture to the wall pieces so blends in better. I then laid out the buildings – I wanted enough space around them to be able to position figures and vehicles, so didn’t cram them in too tightly. In the end there were nine altogether. Again I fixed them in place with clear glue.
Now that the main components were in place, I was able to texture the ground. Inside the walls I simply glued a layer of sand using PVA, with the odd small stone around the edges. Outside the walls I mixed up a batch of emulsion paint, sand and PVA and applied this with an old paintbrush. I mixed in some larger grades of sand and small stones (sold in homeware shops for basing candles) so that I achieved a much rougher texture than the inner area.
The next stage was to add lots of small details to the buildings. I used a few parts from the Brigade 2mm scenery range, there are bits of girder bridges, barns, support frames from an airship hangar, a Roman lighthouse (makes a good chimney) and an obelisk in the main square. There’s the odd roof-mounted water tank and aerial from the 15mm range. There’s also a radio antenna which is the broken off top of a much larger 3D (mis)printed mast. This part proved to be a nightmare as I kept knocking it off – in hindsight it would have been better to paint it separately and attached when everything else was finished, but I kept supergluing it back on.
I also fitted some supports for fabric canopies made from paperclips and wire staples – I drilled into the buildings, walls and base with a 1mm bit and superglued them in. I didn’t add the canopies themselves yet to make it easier to paint around them.
Everything was then sprayed in Halfords white primer, followed by a coat of Army Painter Skeleton Bone. The walls and buildings were them washed with GW Agrax Earthshade, while the ground was washed with Seraphim Sepia. This gave the buildings a distinctly different shade from the ground, even though they were painted with the same base colour. Walls, buildings are ground were all heavily drybrushed with bone or stone paints from the Citadel Dry range.
Other details were painted in – doors and windows, various roof accessories and so on, mostly using Citadel contrast paints which worked well over the pale bone base colour. With this done I was now able to make the canopies from small pieces of paper towel – the type of nasty, non-absorbent cheap towels that we used to get in school toilets! I soaked the pieces in dilute PVA and draped them across the supports, making sure that they drooped as naturally as possible in between. Once the glue dried they were pretty solid. I painted them in either dark red or dark brown using GW contrast paints.
The finished conurbation was christened Mos Arun; ‘Mos’ from the Star Wars Tatooine naming convention, and ‘Arun’ taken from the road name where I live. I’m planning a series of other small building bases to accompany it in the near future, which will also appear on this blog in due course. All being well, they should appear at the club’s Open Day later in the year.
Wellcome to another work in progress Wednesday. Above we start with a close up of Tony’s 1980’s Canadians, Tony said these were “in their 3-colour camo’ scheme (plain olive green for the tanks). The infantry have had a base coat of Army Green – the Canucks had plain green uniforms with US Vietnam-era helmet covers, so relatively easy to paint.”
This is swiftly followed by Mark’s progress on the opposing forces of some Cold War British forming the 7th Armoured brigade. Mark says the paint scheme is “abandoned Berlin camo scheme and have done black disruptive”.
Next up Stephen has added to his sci-fi collection with an interesting miniature he’s named “Captain Selwyn Froggit of the good ship Magic R Morris”
And last but not least this week, Marcus gives us a window into his current work desk and resident projects of planes and various vehicles and terrain for more scuba action.
Stephen ponders on hills and describes his latest terrain piece…
Hills. They just never look right on the wargames table.
Look at a games table and you may see two or three little dumplings, big enough for a few elements.
Those are hills, apparently.
In reality, whole armies and battles are fought on hills (e.g. Hastings). But not on a wargames table where Mother Nature has to conform to a terrain feature that is no bigger than L on any one side and where diagonally it can be no more than L+S. Or some such tortured formula.
So what is a ‘hill’ on the wargames table?
Not really a hill, that’s for sure. I should say that I don’t play too many mass battle games, so the focus of this project is what a hill could be on the skirmish table.
I suspect most of us use modular, scatter, terrain rather than game boards with fixed terrain features. So we are looking at terrain features that can be plonked down anywhere on the table. Which, like it or not, gives rise to that dumpling hill effect.
I had a thought about what those lumps and bumps could be. Yes, it could represent undulating terrain, the majority of which is gently rising. The odd ‘steep hill’ could be a rocky scarp or rise that is covered in broken ground and brambles.
Yeah, that works.
But I thought of what else it could represent, and something that would add character and theme.
The answer seemed obvious – burial mounds and chambers! Yup, that would explain why they are dumpling shaped. It’s not a ‘hill’ so much as a burial mound – game effects are exactly the same.
So that’s what this project is – making a burial mound/hill.
I based this model on chambers such as Wayland’s Smithy – a stone-faced entrance into an earth mound. That would give it a bit more character and presence than just a plain green mound.
The entrance way was made using embossed styrene from Wills Scenics. Rather than just cut the sides diagonally I then went and trimmed the styrene so it conformed to the shape of the stones to make it looked like the stones had been laid. This was then stuck to two layers of 5mm foamboard. The main mound was going to be made from a piece of EPS foam.
The base was cut from modellers light ply and the foam mound was glued to that and the entrance way was glued to the front. To give the entrance a bit of depth I tore away some of the foam (this would later be lined in air dry clay to smooth it out and make it easier to paint).
The entrance, showing the foam board and trimmed edges.
When that had all dried it was out with the Miliput. This was used to make the trilithon doorway and also to cover the top of the foamboard to look like stonework.
Trilithon doorway and top of the foamboard covered to look like stonework
On to painting. I used my standard way of painting stone – start with a khaki undercoat. I couldn’t use spray on this because it would melt the EPS foam, so I slapped on some Revell acrylic khaki with a brush. And, as ever, this was washed in GW Agrax Earthshade.
Undercoated and washed.
I’m not going to go in-depth on the painting – I’ve covered my stonework process before. But, in brief, the whole is then given successive dry-brushings with a mix of khaki and grey and a bit of white. Then a bit of weather – Agrax Earthshade to re-establish edges, and dark green for damp.
After dry-brushing and further washes
Then on to the flocking. It was given a base cover of a mix of railroad ballast and sand. After that it had static grass applied. I think it looks best to leave patches of the ballast or other basing materials on show – a blanket of velvet static grass just looks too much. To add to the texture of the model I then stuck down bits of clump foliage, to suggest brambles, nettles, and other weeds.
The finished article.
And that’s it! A really simple modelling project and now that little dumpling hill has a reason for looking the way it does.
We start this week with some great paint jobs from Eric. Above we have a Chaos Cultist and below a nice close up (sorry Eric, I thought it deserved it) of his finished Custodian Guard Shield Captain.
Next up Mark has made a bit more progress on his British 1970’s infantry, as well as quite a debate among members over the length of the recoilless rifle.
Mark’s son has also painted some impressive Polish from the Napoleonic era.
And speaking of Polish Andy has made some more progress on his 10mm versions.
And last but by no means least this week Stephen has painted up some mutants, he may have a plan for these but they will work nicely for Stargrave.
We will see you next week for yet more progress from club members.
We start this week with a great looking truck for Gaslands from Eric. Eric has also painted another Chaos Marauder.
Next up Marcus has somehow acquired yet more fighters, although he claims this selection of 1:200 Spitfires and Me109’s are for his son.
Now we have the start of 15mm British and Canadian forces from the 1980’s.
Mark is painting up the British and Tony the Canadian’s for a future game they are calling ‘Blue on Blue’.
Next up, I’ve been busy replacing the wound/hit dice that I integrated on the bases of my Wars of the Roses units. The tiny grey dice I originally went for has proven to small for the standard wargamer size fingers. Luckily I’ve been able to replace them with a slightly larger dice.
And last for this week, we leave you with an intriguing start from John for his new scratch built radio mast for a planned Zona Alfa building.
It’s Wednesday and another offering of what members are working on.
I’ll start with me for a change, above I’ve almost finished my Vikings. These are the quickest I’ve painted a group of miniatures for many a year. I need these for a game of Saga and so have put in the time to get them done.
Next up Mark has been painting an assortment of miniatures. The first being a bunch of mutants for judge Dredd.
Next we have an Elf Mage complete with fire spell effect. Apparently the spell effect comes as transparent plastic which Mark has painted with a suitable ink wash to look like fire.
Felix has also been doing a bit of painting with a Halfling Thief.
And lastly for this week Stephen has started a dungeon project. Stephen hasn’t decided what to do with the dungeon but promises there is more of this to come.
That’s it for this Wednesday, see you all next week.
Meanwhile Stephen has finished his skeleton cavalry and added a bolt thrower.
Next we have an Elf Mage complete with fire spell effect. Apparently the spell effect comes as transparent plastic which Mark has painted with a suitable ink wash to look like fire.
Felix has also been doing a bit of painting with a Halfling Thief.
And lastly for this week Stephen has started a dungeon project. Stephen hasn’t decided what to do with the dungeon but promises there is more of this to come.
That’s it for this Wednesday, see you all next week.
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