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.

Return to the Blog

Well its been 6 months since I last posted on the blog. There isn't one cataclysmic cause but instead the usual slow creep of many small things caused me to move my focus away from hobby related pursuits. But the biggest is probably the butterfly effect. I'm not referring to Chaos theory but instead the tendency to flitter from one interest to another.

Rofous Hummingbird

The stem he is sitting on is sculpted, the slice of maple that forms the base is from a fallen tree in my backyard

I think we can all relate to butterfly effect in our hobby. Few of us have the single minded focus and willpower to work thru and complete projects before moving onto another. I tend to move around between various genre and individual projects leaving partially completed models behind in my wake. Sometimes I come back to finish them up sometimes they languish for years gathering dust.

Blue Jay bust

In this case I've been working on sculpting projects just not the usual  miniature ones. My wife and I have a side business selling bird sculptures. She does needle felting and I mostly work in polymer clay. For the past months this is where most of my creative energy has been going.

Evening Grosbeak

I know that most people following a miniatures blog probably don't share my particular interest in bird sculpture so I've only posted a couple of projects here and there in the past. But I also decided to put up a few pictures of my recent favorites.

Boreal Owl

So that's what I've been up to and in the next post it's going to be what I'm working on now.

African Penguins

Lower Fickleham In the Sun

Finally managed to squeeze in taking some pictures of the boards with the village and other terrain laid out on them. It ended up a lot sparser than I thought. I'm going to need more hedges and trees (can never have too many hedges or trees in the collection really) and also some more fields to fill it out.  

I just made a couple of additions to the boards since I last "finished" them. I wasn't real happy with the way the roads blended into the rest of the boards so I added some sand and paste as dirt in the gutters and along the edges. I also used some used and dried green tea leaves as leaves in spots of the gutters and added some patchy static grass on the edges.The cliff board also got some sandy texture and static grass around the rock faces.

Closer look at the improved roads.

I considered adding more grass but I think I want to keep the boards relatively simple and then make several flexible caulk pieces to go over them. These will be fields, rocky terrain, woods and such. I'm hoping it will give me more options overall. I'm still not real happy with the poor fit of the boards together and the unsightly join line. Hopefully the use of overlay pieces will disguise these as well. If I ever make more board sections I'll have to be more careful to get more exact edges but for now I at least have something to play a game on. 

Jimmy Fishhead

I still haven't managed to get the perfect storm of time, lighting, and weather to take better pictures of my boards but in the mean time I've finished up my sculpt of Jimmy Fishhead. I took some pictures of him in my wife's new Foldio lightbox. 

It's very nice to use but I still need to play around to get a better light balance as the grey putty against the white background can make things difficult. 

I've also done some other sculpting of the avian variety. My snowy owl has been completed and I'm trying my hand at more stylistic ( and I'm told by my wife cuter) little birds. We have three shows coming up in the next few months so I need to crank out some birds to stock the tables. 

Snowy owl 

Black Capped Chickadee even rounder than in real life

On the Workbench

In an attempt to get into the swing of posting more regularly I've decided to try showing what I'm currently working on. Aside from the terrain boards I've also been trying to get back into the rhythm of sculpting again. 

I am definitely a hobby butterfly and have a tendency to move from one project to another. Although I guess I'm rather like a Monarch in the fact that I tend to come back to the same projects again and again. The problem with sculpting is that  I'm far slower at sculpting than I am at finding new things I want to work on. This has led to starting many sculpts and then abandoning them as I lose interest and move onto something else. As a consequence I have a whole box of partially finished sculpts ranging from nearly done to barely started most of which I have no idea what I originally intended them you be. So I thought it might be a good exercise to try to make something of them. No real plans on what they will end up being just whatever strikes my fancy.

The box of orphaned sculpts

First out of the box was a rather pudgy fellow that was little more than a bulked out  armature. I was thinking maybe an alien merchant with robes like something out of Star Wars but then my wife said " Give him a fishhead!" and later "How about a gangster suit." And so Jimmy Fishhead, mob enforcer was born. 

Here he is to start. To give you an idea how long he was sitting around I switched from using greenstuff to Procreate to sculpt with about 6 years ago. The head went on first with a pair of generic dress shoes. 

Here is where he is right now mostly suited up. I wanted to do a classic double breasted suit but misplaced my first button. Oh well Jimmy likes the freedom of movement with a single breasted jacket. 

I'm also working on a tommy gun for him. I find doing hard surfaces like this difficult so I'm taking my time with it. Hopefully Jimmy will be done and off the work bench by next week. Then it will be onto the next draw from the box of orphaned sculpts. 

Terrain Boards Finished

Finally the saga of the terrain boards comes to completion. I've been taking the opportunity to work bit by bit on them over the past couple of months. I started these quite sometime ago and then tried to get them complete in a four day rush last November. If you want to take a moment to look back you can follow this link to see the previous posts. Modular Boards

After the last coat of thinned down wood filler as a seal coat I also added some patches of other texture. This was done with a combination of scrubbing on some straight wood filler and using pumice gel I had lying around. ( I bought the pumice originally for basing miniatures but it didn't quite work the way I would have liked so it's getting used up here.)

Rock face after painting

I tried to put in a rough path winding up the hill as well.

Next up was painting. I actually pulled out some of my previous completed terrain pieces that would go with them to make sure things would match up.This is probably more important with the flocking later on though. The wood sides just got a straight coat of black gesso. As much as I would of liked to stain them I had to grind through several layers of the plywood to make the sides straighter and I expect the finish would have been awful.

Roads were kept dirtied up but with some cobbles showing for contrast. 

Last part was putting on the flocking. I used a first pass of mixed colors of flocking. I learned as I went along so the flocking on the first board with the crossroads is a bit rougher than the last. I decided to keep the flocking sparse in areas so that the painted parts show through underneath. If it turns out I don't like the effect once I start using them I figure I can always put another coat on.

All of the pictures were taken quickly with my cell phone. Unfortunately the boards don't fit in my lightbox so the pictures aren't the best. I'm hoping that I can take some better pictures soon with better natural light and with some of my terrain and figures on them.

Passing inspection

All four together.