Place Keeper Post

Things have been busy with being out of town last weekend and heading out to vacation in Colorado this week ( actually due to the magic of automation I should be in the mountains as this goes up.) So I haven't managed to finish any projects yet but I added some pictures below of in progress work.

Two more Big Stone Heads under construction and a few roughed out flagstones for a road.

Little plastic gemstones direct from the factory in China. I'm hoping these are going to be a major component of stage two of my terrain building. 

In other news I'm really excited about the new GW Warhammer Quest game coming out. It has evil birdmen in it! Along with a ton of nice looking sculpts. I'll be picking it up after vacation to try to play with the wife.

Unlike a lot of people I really wasn't bothered by the switch to Age of Sigmar but at the same time it didn't provoke much interest either. I think the Old World setting really made much more sense as a role-playing setting then for a mass battle one. So Silver Tower will be my first real look at it. I know many people can't get behind the stylistic change to the figures but I like the new look to the Orcs  ( or Orukks or whatever they renamed them)  As far as I can tell they seem to be pushing a kinda modern video game aesthetic to the models which actually comes across pretty well. League of Legends on the tabletop. Grognard grumbling aside it has a very striking visual appeal. I'm less into the Sigmarites but I think that has to do with the gold paint scheme something I want to avoid. Not sure I'll go all the way into AoS but it at least has my attention now.

Big Giant Stone Head

With a new set of terrain I'm once again indulging one of my pet fascinations. I got a chance to make some gabions which I had been trying to do for years and now the Big Giant Stone Head.

Why massive stone heads? Not sure. Partially I've always liked the mysterious look of the statues at Angkor Wat and other Khmer sites. Or it could a weird hold over from the resin stone heads that were put out by Dreampod 9 for Heavy Gear. (which of course indulged my other long time fascination of giant robots.) I've made some previous attempts at making stone heads before but they never really came out right.  I was never satisfied with the faces that I was able to make for them.

This time I decided to draw on my recent experience with polymer clay and sculpt the face from scratch. I wrapped a chunk of foam with aluminum foil so that I could separate the face, bake it, and then glue it back on.

At this point I'm sure the question arises "Why a screaming face with pointy teeth?" Well I like my terrain to tell a story. It might be subtle and probably a lot of people wouldn't see it if you don't point it out but it's usually in there. In this case I wanted to create some history for the planet we would be fighting over. In the distant past it was once colonized by humans on the edge of Imperial space. At some point the civilization was taken over by a powerful religious movement causing a regression in technology and the eventual fall of the planet. The statues were erected to honor the new "demigods" that now controlled the planet. In reality this new religion was controlled by a Genestealer Cult and in this case the stone head is of a 1st or 2nd generation hybrid who I would imagine would of been seen as a semi divine warleader or protector. That's also why this head is built into a defensive wall. Maybe a bit much back story for a piece of terrain but when you are spending a couple of hours making a giant stone head you have time to think of these things.

Back to the actual construction, after sculpting the face I carved blocks into the foam and added two pieces to make the remnants of the wall. After gluing the face on I blended it together using some DAS air drying clay.

Next it got a coating of wood putty mixed with gesso to hide all of the different materials. It them got a flexible caulking base which is gonna be a standard for all of this terrain.

The base was painted the same as the mat. For the head I went with a simple grey. Although I stippled it on mixed with browns, greens, and purples. I might try a more brown coloration in the future but I wanted something that would contrast with the red colored earth. I also got in some yellow turf that I mixed in with my previous turf and added to the head to finish it off.

Finally a couple more shots of my Tau hanging out with the Big Giant Stone Head.

Field Fortications

In between working on 40k related projects I've finished up two more sections of gabions. I had done all of the construction for each of these previously and just needed to base and paint them.

I packed the sand mix from the inside this time which was much easier. 

I put a shorter gabion on the end of each one. This way I can put them together a couple of different configurations with either firing positions for shot or as a larger position for a regimental gun.  I'll need a few more to make any real trench line but this group will do for a small revetment.

Detour to the 40th Millenia

There has been a bit of a delay since my last post. I had been working to get some more gabions and a few pikeman painted when my wife suggested she'd like to paint up and play some 40k again. This was an opportunity not to be passed up. She decided that she would play with her Tyranids again and look into adding some new figures. I looked over the armies I had stored away and choose my Tau to once again see the light of day.

One hurdle facing the project is that I really don't have much terrain for 40k anymore. I have a few Imperial buildings that I kept and an old 4 x 8 board but it needs some serious refurbishment. So the first step would be making something to play on. While I really like big set boards whether modular or not I don't have the storage space for them and they take too long to build. Instead I'm going to make a flexible mat borrowing techniques from the flexible pieces I've been making recently.

Since I've never made a play mat before I decided to make a sample piece first to work out any kinks. I purchased a canvas drop cloth to form the base. For this piece I cut down a piece from a 4 x 5 cloth. I also got a 6 x 9 to use for my final mat.

There's a mix of different colored and size sand and fine gravel applied to the caulk. 

Next it got a coating of caulking. I worked this into the cloth using a drywall tool to get a fairly thin even coat. Then the sand went on for texture and was pressed into the caulk. This was left to dry overnight.

It was painted a red brown with a dark brown wash and then i picked out the larger stones with black and a grey dry brush. Everything then got dry brushed up through a brick red to tan. After that Earth tone fine turf was applied. I think the turf is a bit too green overall so I ordered some yellow grass to use with it on the actual mat.

With this sample piece done I'm ready to move onto the main event. I'm also working on some terrain and trying to figure out how I want to paint my additions to my Tau forces.

The mat is very flexible and easy to roll up for storage. 

Some of my Tau scout out the new terrain.

One of the nice attributes of the mat is its easy to make rolling terrain by simply sticking objects underneath.

Future projects: A test paint for my Tau reinforcements and some more terrain.

Imperial Shotte

My first unit is completed for my Imperialist forces. Well its really half a unit as it seems most infantry are in units of 12 in the rules.

I'm using the 1, 2, 3 basing method invented by Dalauppror. I think it's a really clever system that makes for nice looking unit. Still organized but not with the parade ground look you get from square bases.

 I wanted the whole force to match so instead of scraping together the various sized bases from what I had on hand I ordered a set of laser cut ones from Litko. I didn't get the bases until after they were mostly painted so there was a bit of a puzzle getting them to fit on the bases. I had planned out how they would fit together but didn't quite realize how tight they would be. I'm considering upping the diameter of the group bases to make it easier for them to fit but I also like the tight grouping.

The Siren Song of the Gabion

It's strange how sometimes simple things can capture your imagination. A gabion is little more than a big open-ended basket full of dirt but I've always been fascinated by the look of them. And yet I've never gotten the chance to make any due to never gaming a time period where they would be appropriate. ( I suppose I could have made some to go with the cannon in my Warhammer Empire army, but they misfired and exploded so often that they would have served more as protection for the rest of my army from cannon shrapnel than anything else.)

So when I decided to do some 30 Years War the first thing I wanted to make was some gabions. There are a lot of nice resin and even plastic models out there but I decided to make mine from scratch out of wire.

My first attempt showed it was a little harder than I first thought. I salvaged some different sizes of copper wire from an old light fixture for the uprights and used some thin florists wire for the weaving. My first method was to stick the uprights into a piece of pink foam and weave the wire around them. In order to get the wire to look right you need an uneven number of support poles. Unfortunately the pink foam didn't hold them well enough and when I resorted to superglue to reinforce the structure it ate away at the foam making the situation even worse. I still ended up with two usable gabions even though they look like they were made by some drunken sappers.

My first two done. The Saxon is only for scale but looks doubtful about this being the future of warfare.  

For the third attempt I drilled holes in some scrap wood to make a jig to hold the uprights. This worked out much better although there was some difficulty extricating it once complete.

Just starting to weave the gabion on the jig.

Next step was filling them with dirt. In this case I used some pink foam to plug up most of it and then smooshed a mix of sand, paint, and matte medium into the nooks and crannies. Next time I'll probably coat the inside with the dirt mixture first so that it presses up against the inside of the wicker work and then fill the rest with foam.

As is the norm I forgot to take pictures of the rest of the intermediate steps. This is just before getting ready to paint. 

I glued my three gabions together and I embedded them into a caulk base. After that it was finished up similar to my fields. There's room for improvement in the process but I think they weren't to difficult to make so I'm going to put together a few more sections to make a redoubt.

Merlin inspects the finished work.

Back into the Fields

Getting back into the swing of things I've decided to embark on a new miniatures project. I've been following along over the past year with the development of the The Pikeman's Lament at Dalauppror's blog. He has been working on a Thirty Years War version of Lion Rampant and if you have interest in the period or simply want to look at a lot of excellent miniatures across all periods you should check out his blog. Pikeman's Lament is scheduled for release in January so that gives me most of the year to get my stuff together.

While waiting for the first unit of figures to arrive I decided to make some plowed fields. These are basically the same as the one I made some time ago with a couple changes that I borrowed from a tutorial for flexible terrain on Dagger and Brush's blog.

I didn't have any plastic wrap so I used waxpaper instead. This turned out to be a mistake as its now stuck to the bottom of the piece. 

The first was using drywall joint tape as the base for the caulk. It makes it both stronger, thinner and more flexible than the felt I've used as a base before. I also glued a magnet onto one corner so I can attach individual pieces to it on the table. I'm thinking maybe a tree, wagon or other farming equipment. 

Next I spread the caulk over it. I've always had good luck with a paintable brown siliconized acrylic caulk so even though its a bit pricy that's what I used here. I used a chopstick to make some basic lines and the rest of the shaping was done with my fingers.

Next I sprinkled sand across it. The sand both adds texture and makes it less sticky when shaping.

The magnet is under the bits of grass in the upper right corner.

After that its the usual painting and flocking to finish it off. Since I don't have any miniatures painted up yet Launcelot and Merlin and are standing in for them.

I also got in the next stages for the project.