On the Workbench - January 2018

This blog has gone silent again, hasn´t it?
Well, as usual when this happens, things have been going on behind the scenes but I didn´t feel much of an urge to take pictures, process them and put them online.

Still not feeling much like it, but at least I managed to take some shots of the various projects I have been or am working on right now.

Last week I finished these river pieces. I´ve long wanted to add some rivers to my terrain selection and finally pushed the project through after gathering some motivation and inspiration over the christmas holidays

I also worked quite a bit on Code Red (my Modern Warfare Ruleset) in the first two weeks of January. One addition to the Rules was stats for MRAPs for the Americans and Brits. 

During the work on the rules I felt the urge to add an MRAP to my collection.  There are some kits out there, and I might get one at some point, but I didn´t feel like spending money.  In the spur of the moment I remembered how other people achieve great results by scratchbuilding and started chipping away at some foam and plasticard.

  

After a few days, here we are with the scratchbuilt MRAP chassis. The CROWs is magnetized and can rotate. Right now I´m working on the wheels which are a bit of a challenge - too big, too small or too irregular and they start looking ugly.

 

On the sculpting front, I started another set of Special Forces -  these will be a Team in CQB-poses, one Pointman with a pistol (or out of ammo switching to his sidearm - you decide), a breacher with a Shotgun - and not yet started, an operator preparing a grenade or flashbang before the assault.

 

 Hope you enjoyed the small insight into my WIP stuff. 

I finished a lot more stuff in December that I did not take pictures of.  When my blogging motivation returns, I shall take some photos and put them up here. 

Until then, happy wargaming!

Tear Down this Wall! - Rebuilding Compound Walls

I had a lot of different wall sections for Middle Eastern Compounds that I made over the years -many different sizes, shapes and colors. Some mounted on tiles - my Afghan Village compounds for example - some single pieces.


I rarely used the village tiles. They turned out to be too inflexible and harder to transport and set up than necessary. All the different walls, compounds and colors didn´t really fit and they are not a good match with my new desert terrain mat.

So last week I butchered all the different walls and standardized them.

Work began by dismantling the wall sections, removing them from their bases. Most were on cardboard bases that had warped consirably due to painting, turning them into unattractive pieces.
I got rid of all the cardboard, slashed up the tiles into compounds and wall sections and began cutting PVA-bases.  The picture below shows how many walls were involved: 

Work was split over several days. At one point I had to take a break because I had a blister forming on my index finger from cutting the PVA. Fortunately I stopped soon enough and was able to continue working the next day when the irritation had gone.

After all the bases were prepared, I started mounting them. At that point, I had standardized their size, but you can still see the very different colors - Most of the walls were kept raw white and not even painted. Shame on my past self ;)   Terrain was never my strong suit.

After gluing, sanding and priming the pieces, I commenced painting and treated the wall sections with the airbrush.

After everything had dried, the sand received some treatment with drybrushing and washes. Finally, I added some flock and let all of it dry.  After a few hours of work, I had transformed all the ugly pieces to a new standard:

Ironically as I looked for space to store them neatly, I discovered more wall sections that I had missed on the first search. But I´m done with walls for the near future, they´ll either follow at a later point or find their way right into the bin.

Lurking in Broken Ground

Broken ground is some very useful terrain in a lot of settings. As my terrain still sucks compared to the figures I have available, I recently invested a minor sum into extruded pvc-boards and started leveling up my terrain.

After a lot of cutting, carving, gluing and flocking, my broken grund pieces are ready for the battlefield and will provide some nice scatter terrain.

And here are some potential occupants of the Terrain:  Some Servant Cossacks - a dismounted base and a horse holder base.  Again, the AB Napoleonic Horses are doing a great job! I just added a saddle and boom:

Shelled Trees

Quite some time ago, I had started on a rather small terrain piece to create some very localised rises to enhance the otherwise flat playing surface. I never finished it and actually held it in my hands once to discard it.  This weekend I picked it up again and changed my original plan by adding more interest to the pile of dirt I had originally planned.

Unfortunately the picture doesn´t look as good as the original as I screwed up with the light settings this time, be assured it looks a lot better in reality. I was just too lazy to assemble the camera again to take a better photo.

Anyway, onto the original pile I added a lot of treestumps with rugged edges to represent a part of the landscape that took some damage by recent fighting in the area.  Adding the trees also allowed me to make it look individual on the battlefield, rather than just another pile of dirt, without putting much effort into it.

It´s large enough to give cover to a fireteam or machine gun, and will count as hard cover in my games.  Looking forward to giving it a place on the next battlefield.

Diorama Time - Part 2

Halfway through, one evening left to do the finishing touches, but making significant progress.

All figures are painted and based, the terrain has received all major details and has been painted with the first two base colors.

Major to-dos are the detailwork on the bricks, rubble and the wall plaster to make them look remotely realistic. The ground requires some drybrushing and vegetation and I´ll have to define the shadows.

Should I have spare time left, l´ll dedicate it to adding more details into the pile of rubble at the front end of the diorama:

Sorry for the extreme lightning effects, these were quick shots taken without much consideration to special effects.

Diorama Time - Part 1

I´m a bit late to the show, but usually good at finishing things quickly when confronted with a tight schedule...  But I´m attending the model expo in Mainz next weekend and haven´t got the time or motivation to prepare anything yet.

In order to avoid showing up completely empty-handed, I´ve finally started building a mini-diorama that needs to be finished until the end of the week. By using a lot of figures that are already painted and setting it up as a modular display with rather simple terrain, I´m hoping to speed up the building process.

Nevertheless, being my first true diorama, it will probably break all rules and conventions. In order to get a good feel of the end result without running off into the wrong direction, I´ve assembled a very quick model of the final design.

The pillar on the right will be cut down about where the black line is painted in

Looks a bit imbalanced from this perspective with the wall effectively splitting the scene in half.. 

Might have to move the tank a little bit forward?

So... yeah... a crazy week of building lies ahead. I´ll keep you posted!

Pop Some Smoke!

I built some very quick and cheap smoke marker, started yesterday evening and finished today.

The green smoke looks a bit darker than it does in reality - I´ll try to take some better pics on friday during our test game, maybe I need to touch it up a little with lighter green.

Basic construction:
-Form the basic cloud shape out of tin foil, glue it to the base
-Mix acrylic caulk with water and baking soda, let it bubble up a bit as the soda reacts with water and apply to the tin foil.
-Let it dry thorougly
-Paint it up in the color you like (I used my airbrush to enhance the subtle color changes in the cloud - best seen on the blue smoke)

In the background, the next bits of terrain - more rocks in the making!

Afghan Village - Part 4

Moving on with the afghan village - tiles 3 and 4 have got some color. Finishing touches on all of the tiles are needed, but they´re slowly getting closer to their final appearance:

More tiles are in the work :)

Afghan Village is growing (Part 3)

More progress on my afghan terrain...

First two tiles are almost ready, I need to paint the wood on ladder and well into a darker brown-tone - that should do it.

Tiles 3 + 4 are in preparation:

My plan here is to have a small enclosed field on the left tile, together with a little storage house and an entrance. The right tile will be finished by adding 2-3 trees growing inside the compound. Which is a bit difficult as I can only mount the trees after basecoating the tile, otherwise I´d have to repaint it (no need in my opinion, the trees look good as they are)

Afghan Village - Part 2

I´ve spent a little more time on my Afghan terrain improvement, added a few barebone tiles and set them up to show how things could look later on:

Just 4 shots of many different compositions.

Don´t worry about the openings on the edges, I´m planning to straigthen them out later on when adding the sand layer.

Building an Afghan Village

I´ve been working on my terrain recently after visiting the home improvement store and fetching some material.

The first tile is almost finished as a test piece, now I´m building the other modular sections of the compound.

My plan is to create a set of interchangeable pieces that are compatible with each other. I´ll be doing a number of compound-tiles as above, wall-sections and single buildings to create a customizeable village.

This is kind of a long-term sideline project next to all the sculpting and painting, so don´t expect any regular updates.

Rocky Outcrops

The latest addition to my terrain:

Super-quick, super-easy, built in less than an hour if you substract drying time of glue and varnish.

More cover to hide behind!

Another Brick in the Wall

I´ve been renovating today.
For quite some time I´ve been annoyed by the looks of the walls and today they received a fresh painting. Or at least I started painting them, there are several sections still waiting for completion.

This is the result of my painting session on the balcony today:

New Walls. Of course I failed at putting them together for the picture, posing the worst side right to the front, but I don´t care right now ;)

Because - this is how it looked BEFORE:

Quite a bit more ugly. Now, it´s much better:

More to renovation to follow, I´ll be doing the next few section in a slightly more yellowish coloring.