Down Among the Dolmen

Dolmen are found all across Northwestern Europe. Composed of a flat slab of stone set tabletop-fashion on two or more upright stones or megaliths, they're what's left of late Mezolithic/Early Neolithic burials. Once, earth covered the stones to a considerable height to form tumuli, or burial mounds. Time, erosion and ploughing wore down the earth until the stones were exposed once more. They stand as spooky reminders of our prehistoric past.

Like the stone circle/henge I made earlier, I thought a dolmen would liven up the wargaming landscape and be suitable for any period.

First step - the base. One metal cap from an orange juice carton, glued to a roughly-cut card circle. The basic shape of the dolmen rests alongside. The capstone is a flat oval-shaped wood chip glued to three other round pieces cut to length. Top left is an isolated megalith made of another piece of wood chip glued to a fender washer.

Some flocking, again of the trusty dried tea leaves. The dolmen shows another side.

More flocking, this time after the dolmen was glued to the centre of the base using vinyl tile adhesive. I began to apply flocking to the megalith base.

The next step once the adhesive's dry will be a black undercoat.

Zen and the Art of Henge Building

One thing I discovered from my terrain making projects for the tabletop is how wood chip looks very much like stone in the smaller scales. My wife and I recently had a ton of wood chip delivered to use in our garden, so I selected a few likely small pieces from the heap for my next modelling project - a henge for the Dux Britanniarum tabletop.

Henges date from the Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, and are dotted throughout the British Isles. Technically from the archaeological point of view a henge is a space located within a ditch which is itself enclosed by an earthen bank. Stone circles - even mighty Stonehenge - are a different beast, but the term has stuck, so...

As a gaming terrain piece they can therefore appear on any tabletop battlefield set in Britain during any era from the Neolithic on. My aim is to make a small-ish site like those of Arbor Low Henge in Derbyshire or Scorhill on Dartmoor in Devon. I'm in two minds whether to make the outer ditch and bank as the piece will then have a larger footprint on the tabletop. We'll see.

I started with this handful of suspicious-looking brown objects...

Using a mitre box and razor saw I cut them in half, before making the base for the henge. The core of the base is an old CD which I sandwiched between two layers of cereal card, bending the card down around the edges to make a low mound. The cut pieces of wood stand in the background.

Once the card was glued tight on the CD I arranged the wood pieces in a suitable henge configuration and fixed them in place. I decided not to make any trilithon ('table') pieces for the sake of simplicity and robustness. They tend not to feature in the smaller henge sites anyway. The shadows the pieces cast already make them look like the upright stones and sacrificial slab of a small stone henge. I'm on the right track...

The next step was to spread a little spackle around the base and 'stones,' leaving some patches bare. These will be areas of lower ground within the circle when the top layer is done.

Suitably spackled, the piece awaits the undercoat. More to follow...

Butter market built

So here we have it - one butter market/market cross.

I initially painted it grey to match the church, but found it looked too drab. Mixing up a light mustard-colour I repainted it to look like Collyweston stone, a variety of stone found in the British Midlands which varies in colour from pale grey-beige to honey-yellow. The grey paving slabs on the base were drawn on using a sharp-ish pencil.

Of course, now I have a market cross, I need a market place to go with it. I'm thinking of using a section of roofing shingle coated with vinyl adhesive then painted. Not sure if it'll work or not, but I'll give it a go.

In other news, I find I'm horribly tempted to get into yet another field of gaming - WW1 Mesopotamia. The question I ask myself is - do I need another period with troops in pith helmets supported by river gunboats?

A bit of a butter market project

Having finished the church steeple I found myself assembling what buildings I have for the ECW period to see what it all looks like, and thinking the small community lacked something. Most old British settlements have a market place, which features or featured a market cross or a structure sometimes referred to as a butter or corn market. Having a few hours to spare due to rainy weather closing down gardening for a week or so, I thought I'd bung a few Hirst Arts plaster bits together to make a butter market structure. Again, it's in the Gothic style, and for the sake of the narrative was probably build around the same time as the village church.

Here's what I have so far...

The two-step platform for the building is made of metal discs taken from orange juice and Pilsbury dough containers, covered by cereal card and edged with strips of cardstock paper. Hirst Arts components make up the roof and supports, and the pyramidal roof is more cereal card. I'll add a cross to the roof pinnacle like the one on the church steeple. 

Next step will be to paint everything which will be inaccessible once it's all glued everything together then assemble it.

Steeple

So here it is, the completed steeple, seen in place on the tower of St. Aimless the Confused,* parish church of Much Giggling in the Hay.

Those fine chaps of Sir Rick Astley's** Regiment of Foote guard the church from incursions by those naughty iconoclastic sons-of-fun, the Parliamentarians.

Each of the four faces of the steeple has a small window made from rectangles of coffee stirrer cut to shape and shaved into wedge shapes so as to fit the sloping sides. The windows were painted on. The stripes marking planks, tiles, slates etc. didn't make it through the painting stage but enough showed I was able to go over them again with a sharp pencil. The cross atop the steeple took a bit of doing. A thin strip of wood provided the bulk of it, with the two arms being glued to either side to present a flat profile. I inserted the end of the cross into a small bead, pushing enough of the stem through to go into the apex of the steeple. Once glued in place I painted it all gold.

* Patron Saint of the Permanently befuzzled.

** Sir Rick Astley's a thoroughly reliable officer. He'll never give you up, he'll never let you down...

Inigo Jones and the...

Two posh houses? Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but it's a way of saying I've finished the two Jacobean houses I've worked on this last week. Results shown below.

Not too shabby I think, although once again I should probably keep off the coffee before doing any fine painting. I managed to capture the overall look of the Jacobean style. As I mentioned in a previous post, some details had to be omitted due to being too fiddly or delicate for a gaming model. The roofs with the variegated shades of brown and brick-red tiles typical of the period worked. So did the classic 'crow-step' gables.

The chimneys are a bit oversize to give the impression of imposing height to the structures without adding to the tabletop footprint. Antique white craft paint represents the pale limestone used by the architects of the time for window bays and porches, and to pick out the edges of walls, gables and chimneys. I painted the porch columns and entablatures in white so they stand out a bit more.

Next up I'll make a gatehouse or two for the walls I made earlier then I'll get it all on the table for an actual wargame.

A Touch of the Jacobeans

The late medieval/Tudor house is finished, so I thought I'd add some more up-to-date buildings to the ECW village in the shape of two Jacobean houses. The style preceded the ECW by a couple of decades or so, and look quite different from the half timbered/fachwerk* style of the previous century.

I've got the bulk of the painting done, settling on the characteristic Jacobean warm orange-red brick. It's a little too hot in appearance, so I'll probably tone it down a bit with a yellow-brown wash. The window bays and doorways are antique white as these were usually built from pale coloured stone.

Just the windows and doors to do. I'll omit the style's more fiddly detail since these are working models for the gaming table.

Speaking of gaming... I hope to run a solo ECW game sometime this next week. My table has been up and ready for months yet I haven't played a game on it. With luck and a following wind, I also hope to visit family and friends in Britain either next month or November, at which time I'll retrieve a load of figures, models and books which have languished in storage since I emigrated. 

*No, not a 1980's German technopop band. Rather the German name for the half-timbered style.

Summer scenery

Time flies. It's been over a month since I last posted. Summer seems to get so busy, especially when trying to keep a new garden alive during a prolonged hot dry spell. Even so, I found a bit of time to make some more N scale/10mm scenery. The primary use will be for ECW, but it'll also serve for AVBCW.

First up, the edifice I keep thinking of as The Big Hoose. Don't ask me why, as my games aren't set in Scotland. Perhaps it's because I've been listening to The Doings of Hamish and Dougal lately!

The house is a Tudor style affair with three jetty floors and dormer windows. I made the footprint about the same as other buildings in my collection so as not to take up too much table gaming space, but it's taller (second only to the village church in height) so it'll be more dominant in the wee community. Once painted it'll be the main residence in the village, perhaps the home of the laird - er, lord of the manor. The chimneys are Hirst Art blocks. I worked mostly using half-inch foam core with hot glue and Aileen's glue, with card for the roof. A thin coat of spackle over most of the walls and roof gave it a bit of texture.

Next up is a barn. I have enough houses so a few more agricultural buildings are needed. Again I used Hirst Arts blocks, this time for the main structure. A couple of two inch blocks and two angled pieces make the walls and eaves. The texture looks like clay cob or rendered whitewash in this scale.

A card square does for the peaked roof and the barn doors. I may make it a thatched roof.

I thought more walls wouldn't go amiss so I made these from corrugated card and a few minutes with a hot glue gun. They're all ready for painting and ground work.

The lower level walls (left) will surround the churchyard. I would like to make gravestones and tombs in such a way they won't obstruct figures deployed in it. Perhaps something two dimensional would do the trick.
 

Teasel Trees - Finished

'tis Labor Day here in the USA, and I'm staying out of the sun after suffering rather nasty sunburn on Friday. Instead of gardening I spent time putting the finishing touches to the teasel trees I've had under construction for a week or so.

Expanding foam is extremely sticky. I used it to bulk out the teasels and provide good adhesion for the flock. As an experiment I also used it on the bases to see if it would work there too, and it came out better than I hoped.

I flattened the foam down on the bases with a wooden splint and spread it around a bit before it began to harden. The foam still expanded after I shook flock on it, and provided an unexpected benefit when some parts began to swell up and look like rounded boulders. Once all was dried/set I painted the bases, and the final results are shown below.

Overall I'm quite pleased with them. I still have another nine large trees to complete, along with fourteen smaller versions which I may make into orchards.

Once everything is done I'll trot out the ECW armies of those perpetual foes, Sir George Mountebank (Royalist) and Temperance-and-Prudence Knott (Parliament) for an Autumn encounter action. Watch this space...

Teasel trees - Experiments in Colour and Shade

A little more progress on the trees. I opted to use craft paint in the end as they give much more variety in colours and shading than spray paint. They also don't stink up the place, which is important since I have family members who are allergic to the propellants used in spray cans.

I used a variety of acrylic paint and mixed acrylic ink into some of them. A few times I wasn't too fussy about thoroughly washing the brush, so there would be some bleed-over of the previous colour into the foliage to give an extra shading effect.

The flock absorbed a certain amount of the first coats of paint, rendering them darker, but the next stage will be to wet-brush lighter shades on them to bring out the vibrant Autumn colours. The trunks and bases will be the last step.

I'm quite pleased with the overall effect, although the Woodland Scenics foam-covered versions aren't as good as I'd like. I'm going to try out a bit of acrylic inking to see if I can jazz them up.

Thistle trees - getting there

A bit more progress with the trees today. Several squirts of expanding foam and half an hour with the hot glue gun later...

The next stage will be to give them a squirt or two with light green, red and yellow spray paint and do the ground work on the bases.

Tree trials

Experiments with ways to create the teasel trees continue. The last time I made a batch of trees I had problems with finding a good strong adhesive to keep the flock stuck to the teasel. Spray adhesive was used, PVA was painted on, the things were even dunked in household latex paint, all to variable results. Mulling over the problem I decided to try expanding foam.

This stuff is for interior decorating and is used to fill cracks and gaps. Squirted into the crevice or cavity it expands to fill it within a few minutes. It is extremely sticky, sets quickly and reasonably hard. Note: Water kills the chemical reaction that causes the expansion, so keep the area dry when using this. I had bought a can to fill some gaps in our attic insulation, and tried it out on a teasel.

Squirting the stuff in lines up and down the teasel, I immediately rolled it on a flat dry surface until the spikes were entirely covered then rolled it again through dried tealeaves for the foliage. It was then left to one side to set. The results are not bad.

The foam filled the spaces between the spikes and hardened, rendering them less prickly. Once they're based and given a dose of yellow and red spray paint they'll look a treat.

Another experiment I'm trying is with the Woodland Scenics colored foam. I bought a pack of their Early Fall product years ago with this kind of project in mind. It survived years in storage and a house-move and I'm only now using it.

A note: If using teasels, bang the things repeatedly on a flat surface covered with newspaper or into an old Styrofoam tray like I did to get the seeds out. Do this for a few minutes, turning the teasel all the times. Do you think you have all the seeds out? Yes? Wrong. Do it again for another few minutes. Now do you think all the seeds are out? Yes? Wrong. Do it again. Okay, now the teasel's probably empty. Yes, there are that many seeds in the average thistle head.

If this stage is skipped, the seeds can germinate, resulting in odd, pale tendrils appearing out of your pristine model tree. This kind of thing might work well for games with a horror theme, but I'm not doing those...

The foam comes in a sheet form, is rather crumbly, but works when wrapped around a teasel. I applied PVA glue to the ends of the spikes and this should hold it all on without trouble.

The result looks... rather blah to be honest, but I think a judicious touch of a craft knife and red and yellow ink in places will spruce it up (pun not intended). More on the project later.