Over Hedge and Field

Inspired by the scouring pad hedges seen on Panzerkaputs blog I decided to try my hand at the same. Since mine are for 15mm I made a couple of changes. I painted the scouring pad brown after teasing it into the general shape I wanted. I'm hoping it will end up looking like the twiggy under structure.

I also tried out my first attempt at a matte painting for the background.

I didn't want to use the same flock that I used for ground cover but didn't really have anything else at hand. After a bit of research I decided to try making my own sawdust flocking. Luckily due to some old wood working projects and my natural distaste of cleaning up I have a sizable supply of sawdust in the basement. After some sifting I mixed up a double handful of sawdust with watered down green craft paint. After drying over night and breaking up some clumps it turned out surprisingly well. The resulting flock went on top as the hedges foliage.

I wanted the hedges to be large enough to complete cover a man but let larger war-machines still see over.

 I glued it to a felt/caulking strip in the same style as the plowed fields I did.Then finished it up the same way. This is my first finished test piece but I have about ten more to finish up the same way. I will probably make a few more shorter ones as well.

It might come as no surprise that these fellows haven't been keeping up on their trimming.

Field Day!

Now that I have a solid core of buildings done for my village I need terrain to go around them. I have a scattering of trees but I'd also like to add some fields, hedges, and stone walls. First off is an experiment in making a plowed field.

Several years ago I made a set of flexible dirt roads out of silicon caulking so I thought I'd try the same technique here. They had the advantage of being flexible enough to mold to an uneven playing surface and still looked pretty nice.

I cut out a piece of stiff felt to use as the base. The cloth works as a reinforcement so the caulking is a little more durable and doesn't rip as much. Normally I wouldn't use something quite so stiff but I found this laying around in the basement.

Next I covered it with the silicon caulking. I chose a chocolate brown color so that as it gets banged up the base color won't be so jarring. Basically you just want to spread it on thickly like icing a cake and make sure to overlap all of the edges. After it was fairly smooth I covered it liberally with sand to texture it. You can use your hand to press the sand into the caulking a little. Then I used an old straight edge to press in the furrows of the field.

I let that dry overnight and shook all of the extra sand off and peeled it off of the saran wrap. I neatened up the edges a little with a knife then the whole thing got a coat of watered glue and some more sand was sprinkled on to cover up any mistakes.

After drying it was painted up pretty simply with browns and drybrushing and then some static grass and flock to blend it into my usual basing. All and all I'm pretty happy with it. I have several more pieces of felt and some caulking left so I'll make at least a couple more.  

Esoteric Order of Cthon

 Next up some more Khurasan Minis. These four friendly fellows are listed as Octopus God Cultists and they definitely make nice cultist figures. I've always liked tentacle face guys ever since running into mindflayers while playing D&D. I guess these guys are probably part of the inner circle and either came a little to close unspeakable powers or maybe are some kind of hybrid creature. Either way I imagine life with a tentacle face could be a little difficult. Not too many nights on the town.

Heading down to the pub.

 They come with separate heads to give you a little variety, but some of the heads don't fit as well as others. I needed to fill a couple of gaps with green stuff to avoid having weird giraffe necks on a couple. As usual with Khurasan miniatures they painted up easily. I wanted them to fit in either as with a standard Cthulhu sea cult or also to go with all of my worm creatures, the Cthonians. I opted for green robes and a variation of the worm flesh.

Looking at the above larger picture its also become evident that I need to replace my dark green paint as it appears to have some particulate in it. Not as noticeable in real life though but one of those hazards of photographing little figures. After all the actual miniature is less than half as large as the one in the picture.

Disagreement with the local Vigilance Committee.

Neo Jovian Rockets

Many years ago I discovered a game called Bloodbowl. At the time I was in high school and my friends, brother and I played many a league during that summer. Those days of managing a team of and leading them to victory or more often defeat left an indelible mark on me. So I went out and bought a copy of Dreadball. Why not just get some more Bloodbowl guys and paint them up? I have no idea but I'll probably due so at some point as well.

In the mean time Dreadball has some nice looking figures, and the mechanics seem rather clever as well. I also like the idea of doing a Sci-Fi style sports game. I could putting together a team of Star Wars type aliens but to start with I'll just go with standard figures.

I bought the base game that comes with the humans and Orks (or whatever Mantic calls them.) I also picked up the other two original teams. Now my plan when I got them was to try to get them painted up for the holidays and get a game in with my brother, but the reality of life quickly shattered that dream. But there is always sometime this summer or maybe next holidays to get the game in.

So here is the first of the human team: The Neo Jovian Rockets.
 

Gutter Hounds

These little fellas are the Gopher Wolves from Khurasan Miniatures. When I first spotted them in the catalog I knew they would fit me perfectly. I really like the weird anatomy they have, and their strange almost aquatic heads. They are both disturbing but strangely likable.

 
I painted them up to fit in with the big wormy guy that I finished last year. I figure these gutter hounds are more of scavengers that live in the tunnels with the large worm creatures. Following along to pick up any scraps or swarm over anyone that has been run off on their own, like a pack of weird, otherworldly hyenas. 

The hounds head out into the night to search for prey!

Plans for the Year

This post ended up a little behind schedule and maybe it's a couple of weeks late for doing a "New Years Resolutions" post but here it is anyways. As mentioned in the last post I had a couple of loose plans for the last year, but this year I thought I might lay out some more concrete goals in order to motivate myself. I'm also quite aware of the fact that more than likely these plans won't survive contact with the enemy.

1. Update the look of the blog. I've had pretty much the same look since I first started it and thought I might make it a little fancier and change the color scheme. I'm going to try to work up the two pictures below to be big fancy header style pictures. 

2. Get two playable forces done for my Victorian SF Steamworks setting and actually play a game. I also want expand out the urban terrain for this. I'm hoping to actually dabble my feet into 3D printing as its been something that I've had an interest in but really haven't had an opportunity to explore.

3. 50 posts this year. This is really more about motivating me to get more stuff completed and ready to go on the blog than number of posts. I'm hoping the one leads to the other.

I also have three Kickstarter projects that I'm expecting to see arrive this year; Robotech, All Quiet on the Martian Front, and Troll Forged's Alien Assimilation. The last two are mostly going to be folded into my Steamworks stuff hopefully. Robotech will of course be it's own thing but I'm thinking I might be doing a lot of display dioramas with the figures more so than getting them ready for gaming.

Obligatory Year End Review

So it seems like the thing to do to go over what you accomplished in the year. Its been a bit of an up and down ride on the hobby front with a lot of my time taken up with getting married earlier in the year and also diving somewhat headfirst into a new hobby of bird watching. For the most part miniature stuff is a weekday evening activity for me as we sit around watching TVand unwind from work. But even so I'm happy with what I got done this year. 



All of the good guys I got done this year, Brits on the left, miscellaneous on the right. 

At the beginning of the year I set myself two real goals. The first was to paint up all of the figures I sculpted. This I actually accomplished although I initially intended to do so in comic book story fashion. Unfortunately, I just couldn't keep up with that as I kept cringing at my own horrible writing. A wordsmith I am not.

And the monsters! As usual more fun to paint.

I also wanted to put together a bit of urban terrain for gaming. This sorta morphed into the Lower Fickleham project which is actually fairly well complete. Or at least all of the store bought houses are painted and I have a rather nice if not particularly English looking village.

All of Lower Ficklleham together. Actually too much to really fit on my one terrain tile or into my lightbox for that matter.

All and all I'm happy with the year's production. I guess the next step is laying out some goals for 2014 but I'll save that for next time.

There was also a diversion into more traditional Sci-Fi in the spring. I really enjoyed making the terrain but I'm not sure when I'll ever get back to this project.



Happy New Year!

And Thank You to everyone that has taken the time to come by and had a look at my blog this past year!