Bullseye O'Rourke

It's been far too long since my last post and I'm not really sure where the time went. I've been picking away at a couple of projects but nothing too completion unfortunately.

Bullseye O'Rourke armed with his custom made Sharps Big 50 rifle.  

To avoid ignominy of not having anything done for so long I painted up one of the characters I had previously picked up. I think he's from the Rebel miniatures steampunk pack. Hopefully I can get a few more small posts in and get back in the hobby groove. 



Checking in with the locals.



I dressed him up a bit with a tartan waist coat. He also has some five o'clock shadow but not sure how well that came out in the pictures.



More hedges

Here is the rest of the first batch of hedges done. I'm going to make a second set as these were pretty easy and fun to do. Probably make them shorter than the first ones and definitely need to make some gates and corner pieces.

In the meantime I realized that I need to start making some boards for all of this stuff to go on. I've been debating what size and style to go with. Although I visually prefer specific built boards I think for ease of use and practicality I'll make simpler modular ones to start.

Having not played a game yet I'm really not sure how big of a board I should be aiming for. But I'm thinking between manipulating force size and how dense the terrain is I can get away with something along the lines of 4' x 4'. 1 foot squares would give a lot of variety but they don't have a lot of room to make features. 2' square might end up being a little more difficult to store for me.

Just about enough to make a half way decent hedge maze.

So in the end I'm compromising with 1.5' squares. I'm planning on four easy sections first, two with roads and two with hills.

My basic layout currently under close inspection.

Townsfolk

My first set of hedges are mostly finished now but first I also quickly painted up another figure. Once again he is from Khurasan this time from the zombie line and is one of the locals from the Stay off the Moors! set. Although a couple of the figures won't work for me I thought most of them would work as armed Victorian townsfolk as well.

Simple straight forward paint scheme for this simple farmer.

Unfortunately afflicted with the horrible "Sprayed on Cat Hair" disease. Rampant in this neck of the woods.

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.