Tag: Scenery

A Small Forest

I’m not exactly short of trees for my 6mm games, but the occasional foray onto a 6×4 foot table has left my thinking that a few more wouldn’t go amiss. I needed to borrow a few last time just to be sure – clearly not a long term solution.

Step forward Amphibmods and their eBay shop. 32 trees, each 50-60mm tall and coming with a nicely sculpted base, and only costing about 50p each.

Naturally I needed to give the shiny brown plastic bases the Medetian touch so that they blend into the terrain boards nicely. Not too much work, and voila! A small forest to help with those big battles.

 

 

Everything’s come out a bit pinky due to the light outside at the time of day the pics were taken!

Beef

Bought a few years ago, based and undercoated over a year ago – I’ve finally painted this very small herd of cattle. They’re 28mm (from Redoubt possibly?) and will serve as generic scenery in some games and specific loot-type objectives in others.

I took the lazy route and went with an easy colour scheme!
Not much more to say really 🙂

Cows (in skirmish order):

 

 

Simple buildings for the islands

Now I’m back from my hols, I thought I’d follow up the last post with the other naval game scenery I finished in August:

As you can guess, they’re Monopoly buildings. I picked up a cheap set without chimneys from ebay and have decided on basic clusters of 3 houses for settlements and 2 hotels for industrial or military (ie. when placed next to an airfield or harbour) centres.

A quick paint job and I’ve got 4 town and 3 industrial bases, with enough to do the same again if I decide I need them.

I just need a handful of very simple trees now!

Insulation Foam Walls Test

I have plans to make some simple ruins for the Frostgrave fantasy game setting, and for other 28mm gaming purposes. I will mix and match between bought stuff (mainly MDF) and scratchbuilt. For the latter I’ve decided to try XPS insulation foam board, so I ordered some sheets in 6mm and 10mm thicknesses to have a go with.

So far I’ve only managed a few minutes with this material – which involved snapping off a small piece from the 6mm sheet and etching some stonework on one side with a biro. This was much easier and quicker than I expected and I slapped on some undercoat and a couple of grey drybrushes to see what it would look like painted.

I’m happy enough with the results and look forward to trying some proper pieces, L-shapes, etc, with the 10mm material.

Before:

After:

I don’t have particularly grand architectural plans, I just want some wall ruins, with some window and door openings and a few partial upstairs floors to get a bit of height on the table. I think I need a quiet Sunday to really get going on this, but that may be a while away as things stand.

The ease with which this material can be carved has given me some other project ideas, so I may see if thinner sheets are available too.

New Boats from Partizan

In the limited browsing/shopping time I had at Partizan I did manage to pick up a few bits and pieces, including some ready-based S&A hedges and treasure chests from Fenris.

I also added to my growing collection of 28mm boats, with a couple from Empress Miniatures and one from Coritani. Both types are excellent – a bit bigger than the ones I’ve got, and good value too (Empress £10 and Coritani £8). Everything is resin except for the Coritani mast, which is wooden.

I’ve now got them painted up, which was a simple job and done to match my other related stuff. The two from Empress are very suitable as ship’s boats or launches, and the Coritani one comes with a mast and some stowage.

The seats come out of the bigger boats, to allow more figures/cargo, etc, to fit in. Very handy. I’ve also left the mast and stowage loose for the other boat so that I can use them in different ways.

 

I’m very happy with them, they’re handy additions for river and coast-based skirmishes, and suitable for a wide spread of periods.

A Change of Scene(ry)

One thing I’m going to be needing in the future for my colonial Sharp Practice setting is some jungle. Fortunately I have an old, stalled, project to produce some jungle scenery so I’ve got something of a head start. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of work to do.

I’ll be making about 50 bases worth, containing a mix of plastic fish tank foliage and Games Workshop jungle trees. The former are on the bases already and the latter are assembled (although foolishly I didn’t paint them on the sprues first and it’ll take a lot longer this way!).
To get started, and provide myself with a bit of inspiration, I’ve finished a couple of samples and I think they look OK. Some will have rocks/boulders on them as well but this first pair just have the trees.
With a 28mm figure for scale:
Clumps of these bases should provide a decent jungle effect, and I can use taller normal trees behind them to add some height to the canopy. I’m a fan of multi-purpose hobby stuff, so these are nice and generic and might get some use in other scales and periods too, eg:
Only another 48 to go….

Renedra Fences

Renedra have come up with some very effective plastic scenery kits in recent years and I’ve previously made up one of their wooden pontoon bridges and some of their barrels. This time I had 2 packs of their fencing, about 2 feet in all.

I based everything on strips of plasticard, mostly 2 fence pieces to a strip (making about 6″), with a few singles. I cut across the corners of the bases so that the fence ends could butt up as closely as possible. The usual basing materials (mostly sand and glue) were added to the bases (some time ago I have to admit) and everything got a black spray undercoat (much more recently!). Painting was super-quick; brown, grey and sand drybrush layers on the wood, and my standard green and brown bases. About an hour in all yesterday evening.

Nice and simple, but very effective I think – and a real bargain, especially when you’re bought them as a present! 🙂

 

 

More Desk Space Recovered

Another on-going project finished! The Games Workshop Fortified Manor kit has been part-done on my workbench for several months now (since my earlier May post). All that remained was finishing off the painting, which I’d been putting off due to the amount of fiddly bits it involved. So this week I decided to get back to it. A couple of hours of painting later, and it was done. I guess I shouldn’t have left it so long!

I decided to go for a yellow-with-blue-roof look, which would be toned down a bit by the use of grey stone and my usual sand coloured final dry brush. For simplicity I didn’t bother with things like rust on the metal fittings, I just gave them a brown wash to add a bit of depth. All in all I’m pleased with the result. It’s no model painting masterclass, but rough and ready as it is it should fit in well with my other buildings in this scale. I’m just glad I didn’t stick on the other 100 bits included in the box, or I’d still be painting!

All the component buildings and wall sections are still separate, for storage and on-table flexibility, although I can see the walls being a pain during games with the smaller sections easy to knock over. I may decide to stick them together if necessary but I’ll keep them as-is for now. The pics show the full complex on the one paved board I have, which I’ll generally use with this model. Now I just need to dig out some swashbucklers and have a game with it!

 

 

 

 

Finally finished – a few more 6mm buildings

Following on from a recent post about clearing up part-finished projects…

I put together a few more 6mm buildings over a year ago (June 2013 it turns out) to go with my existing scratchbuilt scenery for the Medetian Wars of the 17th century. They’ve needed finishing off and painting since then and following on from the other 6mm scenery I did earlier this month, I’ve finally got them done.

The buildings are fairly generic and I tend to just use a small cluster to represent a village or town. As my armies had grown, I’d decided to increase the number of buildings I had so that a bigger battlefield with several settlements could be represented.

They’re simple card constructions, with card doors and shuttered windows (for ease of painting, and because if war’s coming to town I think most people would close up their property!) Applying sand on the bases (and some patches of wall) and painting didn’t take all that long in the end, and I added a poplar tree to the church and the farmhouse.

Here they are from last year, in production and next to some older finished ones.

 

And here they are finished. I’ve now got about 15 so I’m good for 3-4 villages or small towns. There’s also a windmill (Irregular Miniatures, not my own work) and the watchtower I finished recently too. I think they’d work for the 1859 war in Italy too, if I ever decide to do some Austrians!

 

 

Some small scale scenery

While I’m taking some time off from bigger painting projects I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to dabble a bit here and there, and finish off some things I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Most recently this has involved painting (or in some cases just basing) some 6mm scenery items that I’ve had for a while but not gotten around to.

First up are some poplar trees I bought from Timecast a while back. I’ve used a few on the bases of buildings but I decided to use up the remaining ones by adding a few more strips of trees to the collection – useful for lining roads in sunny Medetia. I cut some strips of platicard and stuck strips of card on top to drill holes into for the wire trunks. As these come as twisted wire I decided to add a little plaster to them to hide the pattern when painted. The bases got a layer of plaster, with sand on top.

When finished they look OK – here they are with a new wheat field.

The field is made from some scourer material torn from a sponge, based on card and surrounded by some Timecast fences. The shack is just 4 bits of thin card which I hacked about to give a dilapidated look.

Next were some fields and hedges which I must have made about 10 years ago, but which got a black spray for an intended re-paint before being put away unfinished (common theme emerging!). They’re simple pan scourer hedges with the odd bit of extra lichen-type stuff, on plasticard strips or field bases. I have some already to add these to, and I think they give a decent effect, especially on a brown board like this one.

 

Finally in this batch there’s a small watchtower, scratchbuilt in card and based on a piece of slate from the garden. I had mostly completed the model a few months ago but put it away unpainted at some point. I decided it needed finishing off so now it’s done. All it needs is a couple of flags (one Medetian and one Fleurian) to fly from the top of the tower to denote who’s occupying it during games.The piece is about 60mm tall and is basically intended as table dressing to go on a hill and look pretty.

 

Everything together from this small batch of bits and pieces..

The Medetian-Fleurian borderlands are a pleasant and picturesque place, no wonder they fight each other so hard to possess them!

I have more items to get through, and am enjoying completing these little unfinished projects. When I checked back through some records of old orders to traders I found a few shocks. The Timecast stuff here was ordered in July.. wait for it… 2002! Twelve years to get round to using and painting it. I have 6mm figures to paint that I bought before that, and I’m sure I really ‘needed’ them at the time! So my new mission is to get through as much old stuff as possible, while I’m in the mood to potter. It’s not the wasted money, it’s the principle. Also, unpainted items and random modelling materials take up at least as much storage space as the finished product, so I might as well get the maximum benefit from them. After that I may decide to depress myself with a review of the lead mountain, and the age of some of it..