Gaming cloth upgrade ~ Early steps

It's been a while since I last posted. The reasons are many and varied, but basically Life got in the way. So, now things are a bit more settled, here's my latest project. 

Last year I bought this section of green cloth from the local ReStore/Habitat For Humanity shop for a few dollars. It's seen a couple of games since, but I've wanted to get rid of the totally unrealistic uniform colour for a while. 

I'm not going to follow the mastic/silicone caulk approach used by others. A little experiment shows it'll take poster/craft paint well, so I'm going to do a small area at a time and see how it goes.

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.

Henge and Bracken

I finished this henge model a couple of days ago, but due to technical issues have only been able to post the results now. So, with the vegetation in place, here it is...

The vegetation is made up of pieces of Spanish moss, mostly painted a dark green-brown, along with a couple of clumps of foam and coffee grounds painted a lighter green and dotted with magenta to represent flowering bushes. A little wet brush stipple work created the dandelion patches.

As Fitz-Badger commented, you have to get the scale right. This model works for 10mm and 15mm figures. Anything larger would find it a bit of a squeeze.

Hadafix the Druid gets down and funky in a private ceremony accompanied by his pet adder, Abernathy, a monstrous snake with a sweet disposition.

Watched admiringly by his wife, Sharon, Hadafix's descendant Father Unctuus blesses the pagan sacrificial stone to remove all that primitive ancestral magic rubbish.

Next up will be another scenery project from the Neolithic Era. Stay tuned...

Flocking on the Henge

More progress on the henge terrain piece...

I currently use a carpet and sheet vinyl adhesive to fix flock to models. PVA would work just as well, but since the adhesive's a leftover pot from another job it's what I'm using. I began at the middle of the terrain piece around the sacrificial slab and spread the gunk outwards using a coffee stirrer, making sure the stuff lapped up to the base of the stones and not on to them.

Once the whole base was covered I gave it a good deep dosing of dried used tea leaves. The adhesive is really tacky, but it pays to press the flocking/tea leaves gently down into it to ensure it all sticks. I left it overnight then shook off the excess material. Here's what it looked like at this stage. The tea leaf brown will add depth and the impression of soil beneath the grass. 

The next step is to get some greenery down.

A light wet brush of 'parakeet green' applied whilst the flock is still damp picks out the grass.

The next step will be to apply a little dark green to the stones and dot some larger vegetation about.

I see a Wood Henge and I wanna paint it...

...grey.

(With apologies to the Rolling Stones)

The undercoat is all dry, so now it's on to the next stage - dry brushing in successively lighter shades of grey.

I'm concentrating on the 'stones' since the ground around them will be covered by flock. You can see how the brushwork brings out the grain in the wood, making it look like weathered stone. I think at this point I'll stop dry brushing since the stones are light enough. The next step will be the ground work, specifically the grass and vegetation growing up in and around the stones.I'll probably add splotches of green in various shades to the stones to represent lichen, moss, etc.

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.

A Steeple learning curve

Not being in the mind for gaming lately I revisited an old scenery project instead. This N-scale/10mm English church model is a few years old now. It's built from Hirst Arts plaster components and the Gothic style means it can appear in any period from the late 12th century right up to modern times. It has a relatively small footprint to take up less space on the tabletop, but is quite tall to make it seem to fill more space than it does. I always intended it to be changeable to a degree so as to increase its use, so I made the top of the tower configurable. It can be plain flat, have a cupola or - now, a steeple.

Flat

Cupola

Steeple-to-be

The steeple is 3 3/4" tall and made from four isosceles triangles cut from cereal packet card mounted on a square plaster base to give it a bit of heft. Some steeples are octagonal, but that's a little bit too complicated a job for me to want to tackle at the moment. Maybe in future. The sides are marked with a fine Sharpie pen. I'm going to add thin strips of paper to the vertical edges then paint the steeple a neutral mid grey colour so it could be wood like early steeples, or tiles or slate, and the black stripes should show through to give the impression of rows of slates, tiles, planks, etc.

A Return to the Sudan

I hope everyone had an enjoyable New Year's Eve, in whichever manner you like to celebrate it. My wife and I saw the New Year in with friends, with plenty of good food. Today is a day off, I'm quite tired, so I'm taking it easy by sorting through my 6mm Sudan 1885 collection and tailoring a new set of Mahdist encounter cards to suit. Jings, I forgot how many Hadendowah I have! I also made a few Arab buildings.

First of all I cut out some basic shapes from half-inch foam core, along with sections of corrugated card to make the walls. I aimed to make two simple houses and a courtyard house.

Next up, some assembly required. Hot glue to the fore!

Once the card was secure, I applied about a spoonful of spackle, smearing it over all visible surfaces.

It's rough stuff at this stage. Once the spackle had dried, I applied another layer, mixing spackle with white craft paint to smooth out any gaps and to cover the corrugation a bit more.

The next stage will be to give them an ink wash to dirty them up a bit then draw on some doors and windows. Allowing for drying time the whole lot took less than an hour to make. I plan on building a few more basic houses, a mosque, and a generic desert fort next. I'm roughing out an idea for rocky patches of desert, perhaps using old CDs. Watch this space...

An early church - 1

Having painted up a priest for the Romano-British, it's only fair to make him a church to lurk in when he's not exorting his countrymen to resist the Saxon invaders. It also gives those Saxon invaders a nice target for a lucrative looting spree...

I made a carcass out of half-inch foamcore offcuts and stuck them together with the hot glue gun. This makes a really rigid form on which to build. Two aisles will go either side, and the end will have a rounded apse - the signature features of early Christian churches in Britain. In this case I took the used stiff card tube from a roll of clingfilm and stiffened it further with a layer of thinner card. Once the glue had set I cut it into a half-round, as shown. It's a little over the height of a man in this scale, and will eventually have a conical roof.  

The walls will be made of stiff card cut to shape. At the moment I'm thinking in terms of Romanesque pantile roofs instead of thatch to make it more distinctive. Thatch is far easier to make, so I'm not really looking forward to it! The whole structure will be taller than the domestic buildings I made earlier so it'll dominate the settlement, although the tabletop footprint will be about the same.

~ Our house has sold at last, and as things stand this will be the last model I'll build here. I've many happy memories of building and gaming in my hobby room, and I hope the next place we live in will bring the same pleasure. ~

A few more Frostgrave pieces.

Ongoing computer problems have plagued me this past week but hopefully they should be resolved soon. Meanwhile, I've pressed on with a few more Frostgrave terrain pieces.

A jail frontage, shrine, treasure chest and barrel - and an undead guardian...

An adventurer encounters the unhappy spirit.

Showdown over the treasure chest - or are the contents of the barrel the real prize?

These are for sale, so if you're interested contact me off list.

Frostgrave terrain?

A question - is there a market for ready-made Frostgrave (TM) terrain? As some of my readers will know I have a number of the excellent Hirst Arts molds and some skill in scratch-building. Examples of a set of bookends - The Sage's Lair - I made are shown below.

If anyone would like a set of Frostgrave stuff, let me know.

Heading to the Hills - 6

And now for the final stages of the hill construction. I filled in a few blemishes which still persisted in showing through the paint, and added patches of sand to break up the smoothness of the top surfaces.

This was followed by a wash of brown craft paint, which I allowed to dry thoroughly before moving on to wet brushing in light tan followed by magnolia.

I restricted the magnolia highlights to the upper half of the pieces. Having darker tones at the bottom segueing into lighter shades at the top gives a greater impression of height to an object.

CSM Harrington and Cpl. Lewis find something interesting to shoot at.

The hills can be used in any time period and for Pulp, VSF and SF gaming. These are the terrain pieces I wanted done before moving on to the next Darkest Africa game. The Barsetshire Lads have had enough time off; now they face the challenge of traversing the rugged hills before reaching the lake country to the north of G'Wundaland. Will they succeed? Who will try to stop them? Stay tuned to find out...

Heading to the Hills - 5

I got a modicum more work done on the hills. The paint worked well, so much so I don't think it needs another coat. One problem that did arise was due to the presence of a number of shallow cuts on the top surfaces of the foam, leftovers from the manufacturing process. I thought a coat of paint would conceal these, but instead it only enhanced them. A coat of diluted glue scattered with sand fixed the problem.

On to the next stage then, creating the groundwork on the talus slope.

I used diluted Aileen's glue scattered with sand to get the effect of small stones/gravel/chippings that had fallen from the cliff faces. The larger 'stones' are coffee grounds glued in place next once the first had dried. I placed these on the lower parts of the slopes where heavier stones would roll naturally. The glue should hold the stuff in place, but I'll give it a wash of paint to seal it all down.

I'm now thinking in terms of giving the lot a good wash with a diluted darker shade of brown then picking out different earthen colours by dry-brushing. We'll see what works.

Heading to the Hills - 4

The brutish construction work on the hills is complete. I'd originally intended for the slopes up to the plateaux to be suggestive of points of access rather than pieces figures can stand on. After a bit of thought I decided to go with functional slopes after all as they'd add to the effect during gaming. The bases are corrugated card as I can't find a source of thin MDF/Masonite around here. Once I do get hold of some I'll fix the hills to it, but until then card will have to do.

I cut the bases to leave plenty of wriggle room for me to fix the talus slopes in place. Once I'd got these how I liked them I trimmed the card down to reduce the footprint for each hill. It's a bright if cool afternoon today, so I took advantage of it to slap the first coat of paint on the pieces.

The paint I used is a rather thin watery variety of latex satin paint. As a household paint it's definitely under par, but it works just fine for getting into the cracks and crevices. I'll leave the hills to dry thoroughly overnight before the next coat goes on tomorrow. After that I'll work on ways to vary the colours and shading to get an effect something like the rocky terrain of Wadi Rumm, Jordan, although not quite as severe weathering.

This spectacular landscape was where Lawrence of Arabia campaigned, and the historical location was used by David Lean to film the movie. Now, I have the movie out on library loan at the moment, and I am also reading a great deal about the campaigns in the Middle East in the Great War and the years up to 1924. There's a lot of potential for gaming the period, and these hills will suit the terrain. It's too tempting for words...

More photos of the work in progress to follow.

Heading to the Hills - 3

Time for another go at the hills, with the beginnings of the talus slopes at the foot of the cliffs.

The first stage is to hot-glue a row of triangular pieces of corrugated card to form the general shape of the slope. Apart from the odd wince when I accidentally touched molten glue spots, this stage passed without damage to life and limb. 

The next stage is to glue strips of paper onto the triangles. I aim to glue two layers overall using Aileen's tacky glue to get resilience without too much weight. It's a bit time-consuming. Aileen's is a type of PVA but it lacks something of its water-solubility. Given my druthers I would prefer PVA for this job as it soaks into paper that much better.

Next up will be the painting stage. I intend to make a watery mix of ordinary household latex beige paint and daub it all over the pieces to try and fill as many gaps, cracks and divots as possible. It will also stiffen the paper as well. It's inevitable that some bubbles will stop the paint from sticking in the deeper parts, so the job will require two or three goes-around before the pieces are entirely covered. Luckily the weather here in NW Ohio is lovely right now, so the painting can be done outdoors where it'll also dry quicker.

Heading to the Hills - 2

A bit more progress on the new hills today...

I'm making them in the form of stepped hills with the type of heavy stratification found in some part of Earth...

...and, for Victorian SF games, Mars!

The photo below shows the kind of look I'm going for. The ramps on these two pieces probably won't take a figure, but they're really intended to give the impression the upper surface is accessible. Hot glue worked just fine for fixing these in place, so it went quicker and easier than expected.

The next stage is to make the layers of stratification. One way is to use a Stanley knife, but I got good results with a stiff wire brush. Top - knife, bottom - brush.

I'm toying with the idea of gluing pieces of thin corrugated card on the tops of the uppermost levels to represent eroded layers of rock. It'll break up the uniformly flat surfaces without being too much of a hindrance to standing figures on. Another feature will be the talus slope at the foot of the cliffs. Obviously I don't want to make these pieces with too large a footprint, but I feel representing this debris will make the whole look better. I've got a couple of ideas in mind, and will experiment to see which works best.