A ruined Italian house.

I picked up one of the Airfix resin buildings cheap a while back. It was one of their Italian/ mediterranean styled building. I thought the basic building ( as seen here ) was a bit plain so I jazzed it up a bit. I added the remains of a ceiling/ attic and based it with some rubble. I remembered to paint the underside black before I stuck it down too.

I painted it with some cheap acrylics and then added some static grass and tufts. I’m quite pleased with how it has turned out. It should be a nice addition to my scenery collection for that part of the world. Just need to get it into a game next, now where did I put my 20mm partisans….

 

Cheers,

 

Pete.

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Two very different houses.

I’ve always enjoyed making terrain- much more than making kits or painting figures. I guess that like many children of my era I harboured the ambition to go into special effects model making all of this came from repeatedly watching the original Star Wars trilogy… anyway enough nostalgia.

Our group has been dabbling with SAGA the dark age skirmish game. Whilst the majority of my terrain is for 20mm twentieth century gaming and as such the buildings will be of no use for 28mm early medieval set ups the trees and river will be fine. Accordingly we needed some suitable buildings. I bought an MDF kit from War Bases to try out some techniques with before building up a whole village.

I like MDF buildings a lot- but only the cheap ones… I think that they need a lot of work to get them looking right so I don’t see the point of spending a lot for detail that I’ll just cover up afterwards. As such I just see it in the same way I look at my own designs cut out of foam board.

If you look on War Bases’ site you’ll see how plain the kit is. Here it is after I detailed it.

Balsa wood and filler (spackle) were used on the walls whilst a towel was cut up to represent the thatch. I’ve previously used teddy bair fur but was unhappy with it, hence me trying towelling.

Here it is finished. Respendent in many shades of sandy brown.

 

Moving forward a couple of centuries I’ve decided to get a urban UK set up going, based on a couple of on-a-whim purchases at the local model shop. I want to game some Winter of ’79 type game (think late 70s civil war in the UK, popularised by a blog then published as a ruleset). To be fair it wasn’t that much of a whim as I was half looking for them- I’ve recently been sent a very nice detailed, almost RPG set of rules for the setting that I want to try out. I went for card railway models from Metcalfe models as they have just the right look of red brick terraced housing, I bought the basic terrace and a corner shop. The kits are quite involved, each one took a couple of hours to do. That said they are very well designed and make for a sturdy construction when finished.

I’ve put up a few pictures of their construction so you can see how they go together.

I can see myself building a lot of the basic terrace to fill the table in the way I want.

Cheers,

 

Pete.

 

 

 

 

A little bridge.

I’ve recently bought this useful bridge from Anyscale models (they have a great range and are very reasonably priced, check them out here ) it is listed in their 28mm section but I’m planning to use it for my 20mm toys as well.

It’s not the most interesting piece of terrain but it really will be useful.

It is a nice size to fit over my resin stream sections.

One of the Airfix trucks from my previous post negoiates the roadway.

One nice touch is that the kit comes with enough parts to do a ruined version… in case there is a well placed artillery/ bomb strike or someone tries to drive too heavy a tank across it.

Cheers,

 

Pete.

Bargain price game mats.

Given the quality job Pix Art Printing clicky did with the game maps for my recent Case Blue megagame I decide that I put some more business their way. Several years ago I bought a few game maps from Wargames Vault clicky with the intention of printing them out onto paper and assembling them as a jigsaw. This didn’t work so well for various reason… but now there is Pix Art I decided to send them there to be printed. Using MS Publisher I added all the images together into one massive file and then waited for a special offer to be on to maximise my savings.

In the End I got a 130cm by 350cm vinyl at printed for £30 including delivery from Italy.

I got a 120cm square wasteland mat that will be ideal for any game set in the Middle East/ North Africa, as a point of comparison the going rate for a comparable sized mat by itself seems to be about £25.

This 120cm by 60cm costal strip will be great for ampibious landing be it in WW2 or the Dark Ages, the textures should work for both 20 and 28mm sized figures.

I added a few maps from my Print and Play board game collection- here we have maps for the Russo- Japanese War, WW1, fictional WW3 and right up to date with the War in Donbass.

 

A slightly smaller urban mat- should be useful for some of the 40K figures I’ve painting recently.

Finally I printed the map for use in Brian Train’s free urban COIN game: Maracas clicky

 

All in all I’m really pleased with this. They should last for ages and as they are easy to roll storage isn’t a problem either.

 

Cheers,

 

Pete.

 

 

A Shot Heard Around the Universe- the megagame.

A couple of weekends ago I was in Leeds for the most recent Pennine Megagame offering ‘A Shot Heard Around the Universe.’ This was an original offereing by Tim set in a universe of his own creation. Imagine a series of inhabited systems at the edge of a galaxy owned by a distant but powerful empire, the systems are feeling hard pressed due to increasing taxes and feel a little forgotten… the whiff of rebellion and secession is in the air.

Being a space game I decided to volunteer my services and provide some 3D props to the game. I thoughht if every team had a model planet it would not just add to the visual element of the day but a physical representation to identify with would help team immersion in the game.

The models were surprisingly simple to do. Once I found some polysterne balls (and one ping pong ball) of the right size I mounted them upon bamboo skewers and primed them with a tick coat of PVA. This was to give the balls a bit of rigidity and well as give the paint something to stick to. Expanded polystyrene can be difficult to get paint to adhere to at times.

I got a list of the descriptions of the planets from Tim and put the base colour and basic continents on with a brush. After that it wasa simple job to shade the planets by dabbing on various complimentary colours with a bit of sponge, blending it all together whilst wet. The final touch was bit of white sponged on those planets with seas to represents clouds. I didn’t go to excess here to keep the underlying detail.

After another coat of PVA to seal them I made some stands for them with cut down pens and air drying clay.

Once all set up on the large game map I thought they looked pretty good and added to the day.

My role on the day of the game was being kept very busy running the espionage map on a side table. The board represented a mixture of physical and conceptual areas on each of the planets and the security agents moved around the nodal map conducting operations. It certainly through up some interesting situations in the game, the system worked fine but some of the values need reworking. One player did out manoeuvre the rest with skillful play- can’t remember the last time I had a player so successfully Machiavellian.

Cheers,

 

Pete.

Urban scatter terrain and winter PMC/ SOF figures.

To break up the long running series of posts of my holiday photos I thought I’d throw in some bits I’ve been working on.

I play a few PC games- I’m not a hardcore gamer by any means but I like a good co-op session with my friends, its good to relax chat and shoot stuff online for a few hours every now and again.

One of the games that I’ve been playing a bit of recently is ‘Tom Clancy’s Division’, set in a disease ridden anarchic New York city with gangs and a rogue Private Military Contractors running about. [I’m pretty sure Tom Clancy had nothing much to do with the game, it was released after his death, but his name still shifts units…]

 

Inspired by the game I’ve been making some bits and pieces for my modern gaming collection all in my usual 20mm size/ 1/72nd scale.

A large barricade I made up from various bit and pieces: skip, shipping container, truck cargo bed and resin cast rubbish bags.

 

Back view: the base sections came from old Matchbox kits.

 

A couple of rubbish piles and skips mounted on Wills plastic scraps.

 

Some sections of modern concrete barriers, these and the rubbish piles came from Anyscale models clicky.

 

Some wooden barriers, MDF kits from Blotz clicky.

 

These are my PMCs inspired by the game’s Last Man Battalion protagonists: I used Elhiem Minitatures clicky US Rangers from their Somalia range. White helmets and jackets, trousers in UCP and webbing in Olive green mean they’ll do for US SOF types if I need some in winter bases.

 

For transport they get two HMMWVs. These started of as toys, a gift from Tim at Meghablitz and more clicky but scrubbed up very nicely. I painted them with spray cans using blu tack as a  mask. They were then finished with acrylics for detail and oils for weathering. A big thanks has to go out to Tim for them.

 

Cheers,

 

Pete.

 

Some Middle Eastern Scenery

 

Just finished these pieces of terrain – all with a desert theme. I’d popped into the local model shop and bought a 4 pack of OO gauge shipping containers from their model railway ranges. I decided to do 3 for my middle east tables (the fourth is being built into an urban barricade).

The small adobe building is from Blotz. It was quickly textured with a mix of filler and textured spray paint.

The last building I’m rather fond of. It was an MDF kit from Sarissa- Precision. It has a more Middle East urban feel to it, I’m planning to pick up more from the same range.

Cheers,

 

Pete.

http://www.knightwing.co.uk/

http://blotz.co.uk/

https://www.sarissa-precision.com/