Oopse Paint

I'm sure this is nothing new but I figured I would share for the sake of those who may not have discovered the wellspring of cheap project paint. I am always on the lookout for the inexpensive sources of paint, especially for the purposes of base coating large areas such as in the case of terrain projects. I have found that the local DIY stores are a great source for this.

Many of them have a rack, nestled, not always so visibly, next to their paint counter. This is where they keep what my wife called the "oopse paint". Oopse paint is that stuff that was mixed and not the right shade or mixed wrong or whatever else can befall the masters of paint alchemy. The bottom line is that you can get some good shades at about $0.50 per 7 ounces. The pic in this post shows my latest acquisition which was a collection earthy greens and sandy tones. Even if you can't find the colors you need, I find this is a good way to get some good, but cheap paint that you can slop onto a piece of styro terrain that you need to seal up.

Check it out!

-Eli

Dropship Kitbash Revisited

Ages ago, I started this little gem...

That's right, a batmobile from the new movies converted into some mammoth of a dropship. it was intended to be the sort of dropship that gets you to the planet and then drops you on it, sticking around to help you finish the job. Well it sat around for a while....

Three years later, I am now getting back to work on it. I've decided that this mercenary rig needed some savage warpaint and as I started painting stripes and lines on some of the raised pieces of the hull, a pattern started taking shape. Holy crap it had a skull on it!

So I went with it and now how a scrubby, white-washed and weathered skull pannel painted over the base OD green color....

Alien Terrain - Ghost Trees

A while back I started working on these but time and inspiration had abandoned me. Recently I got back to them and started working them toward finished. I'm not there yet, but I thought I'd show where I am going with these.

The end result I am after is something haunting and gaunt, hinting at and ancient life form. I am calling these "Ghost Trees" and they are in many ways the silent ghosts of an ancient ocean that no longer exists. What you are seeing here is the petrified remains of some coral like structure.

I built these anchored an looming over a dunw-like ridge. The final colors will be a dirty mix of calcified whites with bits of color peaking out. The colored one in the pictures is what they looked like after a brown wash over the back white color. I'll go over them with a drybrushing of white again and then some very watered down pinks and oranges.

More Giger-esque Terrain

So, I finally finished the second piece of terrain made from real pumpkin stalks. This time around i wanted to do a bit of a larger bit that actually created a terrain feature with function - a bug lair.

The pumpkin stalks were glued into a dunes-shaped cut of styro over which I painted and textures, painted some more and then inked. The bug holes were worked into the piece using green stuff that I shaped in a very basic manner to try to make it look like it was of organic construction. There are three portal holes for bugs to pass through flanked by some venting that would allow atmosphere to lower levels.

-Eli

Giger-esque Terrain From Seasonal Materials

Every year my wife goes on a flurry of seasonal baking. Part of this whole whirlwind of carb-apocalypse is the processing of fresh pumpkins. This involves halving them and roasting them, etc., etc.. This year I took note of the stalks that she breaks off of the top halves of the pumpkins and got a bug of an idea.

I had her throw the stalks into the oven with the halves this time to bake them to a nice petrified consistency. As the stalks are already dry enough to be knocked off the pumpkins with little effort, this worked quite nicely.What I ended up with were several nice, organic shapes.

I began by cutting out several stiff card bases (old Warhammer 40K vehicle cards). I used simple super glue to attach the stalks to the bases and then used some Spackle to build up the bases. I let this dry overnight and then sprayed several thick coats of sealing spray over the whole thing and let that dry, repeating until they had a nice even finish much like plastic or resin but not so much that it obscured the surface details. I base-coated this all black with spray paint.

When it came to doing the final detailing and painting, I surfaced the bases wit ha simple layer of base grey paint run through my "sand box". I applied a liberal amount of Devlin Mud wash to the base. The original paint scheme was going to be some sort of bleached out shade of petrified wood or bone coloring, but once I started looking at the black spires jutting out of the wasted looking ground, I thought of a much more sinister - Giger stuff.

A light dry brushing of an eerie blue along the ridges and bulbs of the pumpkin stalks really cast these in that black as night, nightmare shade. The picture above doesn't do them justice.

I have several more of these and am tempted to try to resin cast a few so I don't have to wait until next Autumn for more. I may try to paint a few in the originally planned bone shades and see if I can replicate that sci-fi "ancient fossil" effect.

I imagine this would work with any other similarly wooded plant stalk and am considering other forms of squash for smaller sizes. If one wanted to, the shapes could easily be replicated with modelling clay as well. I only used the stalks because I had them available and felt like experimenting with found materials. 

-Eli

Experimental Buildings

For a while now I've been looking at the cheap, paper gift boxes found at craft stores. I've always thought they would make perfect fodder for quick and dirty 15mm terrain. Well I finally went out and bought a few and cobbled them together into the building above. Except for a wrong cut that I patched together for the sake of completeness, I think it worked out pretty well. 

I marked out the doors and windows in Sharpy and then got to work cutting and gluing. Each box comes with a lid and I found that if I flipped the box over and glued the lid to the top of the box it made a nice building with a rooftop patio. The style is slightly Middle Eastern and certainly could be used for any sort of indigenous adobe construction. Stacking a second box on top of the the first, allowed for a second story with a nice reinforcing trim where the stories joined.

Considering that these boxes come in a variety of sizes and shapes it is conceivable that an entire sprawl or vertical adobe structure could be cobbled together with little difficulty. Using a little filler or even some simply strips of paper glued over the joins between the boxes would give them a more solid appearance, but even without this, the effect is still pretty effective. Once painted and shaded it should be less apparent. 

One nice thing about these boxes is how solid they are. they require absolutely no reinforcement or basing and would be easily left in such a fashion that they could be plugged into any sort of scenery. With their bottoms open they can also be used to conceal miniatures for those occasions when you want your hostiles to be less obvious. As much as they do not need it, I do feel that a little creative basing with some scenic effects would bring these into their own, I think.

-Eli

Terrain Lab - New Potential Colony Buildings

A recent trip to a local shop called Creation Station turned up the usual bits and bobs for adding details and texture to terrain projects as well s a few unplanned finds. Prime among these finds were a couple of types of small plastic boxes, originally used for some sort of medical testing equipment their outer appearance looks like a good start for a science fiction building.

Inside one of these types of boxes, I found a few useful extras. There is a holding rack as well as two removable dividers. Though the rack is not really suitable for 15mm (holes too big) it might make good decking for 28mm or perhaps even some sort of dungeon grating for 28mm fantasy. If anything, they could be used as the basis of some sort of platform with a new surface added on top.

The boxes are nicely hollow inside and the top section that would be the roof, is hinged to allow it to open. I am not sure this function would be able to remain after conversion into terrain, but if it were you could use the interiors for storage of miniatures or even detail the interiors of your buildings. There are some nice scifi arches and texturing that would lend well to an interior space.

The second kind of plastic box was less interesting that the other. Though the top comes off there really isn't a usable inside. The overall shape is very basic and usable for a building with the addition of a few basic features like doors and such. I only picked up one of this kind, so I didn't have a change to test if it would stack well or not.

If you have any local surplus junk shops or anything you may be able to find this sort of thing. At 2/$1 how could I pass them up? That's about 1/4 the cost of plastic electric junction boxes.

-Eli

A Few New Hobby Supplies

28mm barbarian slinger for scale

Was out and about with the wife today grabbing a bite together and doing a little bit of shopping when I found a few useful bits here and there.

First thing was found at the local Cash & Carry and has much potential for terrain building. Bought in bags of 100, these are dense wood sticks intended for use in candy apples. They are just about perfect for turning into palisades. Tapered on one end to a dull point, they can be used right out of the bag for simple projects or you could distress them for more realism. You could also cut off the pointed ends and use them for log construction.

The other find was a bag of various brass offcuts and end pieces of various diameters and lengths. These are sold in the modelling supply section of my local model/RC shop Galaxy Hobby as "Special Shapes". These are going to be useful in terrain building and sculpting.

I am looking forward to cracking these open and seeing what I can do with them.

-Eli

Terrain Lab - Garden Patches



Lately, I've been working on some light weight terrain while I take the time to score some proper buildings or build them myself, whichever comes first. As I do not like to spend a ton of money and enjoy coming up with my own ways of doing stuff, I decided to dig into the junk drawers and see what was there. The answer? Old pizza box liners.

Oddly enough, you can keep this stuff around without attracting flies and the corrugated finish has a number of uses from cheap Spanish tile roofing, to corrugated iron, and now garden patches. The process is relatively simple, though you can layer it on as much as you like and to whatever final effect you want -

CONSTRUCTION

1. Cut corrugated pizza box liner paper to desired size.
2. Round off the corners of the pizza box liner.
3. Glue liner to stiff card, leaving a modest rim between the edge of the liner and the edge of the card. Make sure to minimize air bubbles and rippling in and under the liner. I used hot glue as it gives and instant result. Any unsightly ripples or air pockets can be taken care of by slitting the liner and then gluing it down. This has an added benefit of causing some nice irregularities in the relatively uniform corrugation.
4. Round off the corners of the card and cut little irregularities into the straight edges. You want the patch to be pretty much rectangular, but not mathematically perfect.
5. Build up a raised rim in the space between the edge of the liner and the edge of the card. I used hot glue again as it produced an irregular finish and hardened/dried quickly.
6. Coat the entire piece in white glue. Make sure to brush the glue along the furrows so as not to mute the detail too much but at the same time, don't be too uniform.
7. Dip the whole thing in fine grit and let dry.
8. Once the grit is dry, paint the whole thing with whatever color ground you feel is best. The paint will dry irregularly because of the sand and may require multiple coats. Let mostly dry.
9. When the earth color is mostly dry, run a fresh coat around the raised rim of the garden patch and dip the whole thing in flocking or turf. The idea is to get an almost uniform covering on the rim, with just  few stray patches in the furrows.
10. Apply two coats of spray sealer to affix the flocking.

ACCENTS AND VARIANTS

The above steps will produce a very basic garden patch that is good for unplanted or fallow ground. the irregularities in the paint and the flocking make it almost unnecessary to dry brush or shade. I did try brushing some dark brown ink over some of the patches that wouldn't darken up enough, but it looked fine without.

If you wanted to make the garden more or less "alive" you can add plants and minimize the amount of flocking you allow in the furrows or you can do what I did on one and heavily flock the furrows and then brush them flock around, creating a clotted and disturbed earth effect. More foliage on the furrows could give it a truly overgrown effect. I think I'll try putting some poles and strings in one of them to suggest beans or peas. I have considered adding squash, pumpkins, or other resilient self-starting vegetables in some of them.

Take care,

-Eli

Dark Ages Terrain Video Post

So, I was playing with my little digicam and realized it can take videos as well. How neat. So, I did a quick little video of a Dark Ages project that my buddy Chuck and I have been working on. As a funny side note, I got in a lot of trouble for making it sound like I'm the only one working on it.

The basic process was borrowed from a post the The Historical Miniaturist.

Two Hours and Two Pizza Boxes

A couple of years back I was faced with the task of trying to cobble up a serviceable town to fight a FOW of game in. Not having a ton of supplies on hand, but not wanting to disappoint, I grabbed my hot glue gun and a couple of handy pizza boxes and in a flurry of cutting and sticking, came up with this, Kardograd.

It's not the prettiest or most precise construction and really was intended to get terrain on the table in a short amount of time, but I really do think it's time to try and dress it up and finish it a bit, even if that just means throwing on some paint and some rubble.

What makes this project, as old as it is, still stick out for me is the speed and overall effectiveness of the initial build. I found that regular cardboard pizza boxes are nearly perfect for designing terrain for 15-20mm figures. The side parts of the boxes are about one story high and if you pre-measure the larger flat parts, you can easily estimate and eyeball the rest. It took me two hours from beginning to end on everything you see in the picture above. I could have continued on to do more, but I didn't want to build more than I could store.

The pictures above shows how simple the multi-level construction throws together. The hot glue made attaching the walls and floors super easy and fast. No waiting for drying or complicated pinning or framing. The glue holds tight and strong and repairs easily. Any leftover globs will be worked into the rubble and general clutter of the terrain. Where walls needed extra bracing at the base, I put in stacked cuts of card that will eventually be covered with rubble build-up.

Kardograd is quick and dirty terrain building at it's best, if you ask me.

Take care,

-Eli

Holiday Treats Turned Handy Storage

Every year my wife bakes the crap out of the holidays filling the house with yummy treats and many interest packing containers. A couple of years ago, she began bringing home this odd snack mix that is like a Holiday Chex Mix full of chocolate chips, chunks of graham, marshmallows and sweetened rice serial. The snacks are mediocre at best tasting like hand-fulls of ultra-sweet, dry s'mores. She makes better use of them as cookie filler.

Anyhow, they packed in sealed plastic and then inside of tins with a plastic window in them. I've been collecting the tins and using them for storage of hobby supplies.  They are perfect for storing clump foliage, sand, flocking and such in a way that allows you to see what color or mix you have in there without having to open it up. For better restocking and keeping track of what I use in projects, I started cutting the labels off of the original packaging and taping them to the tops.

So far this has worked pretty well. I use a number of food and snack packaging for hobby/craft stuff. Gum containers with flip top lids, cat treat containers, seasoning shakers, even tubs for face cream and such can make really handy ways to store stuff without having to have a bunch of loose bags laying about.

Another nice thing about using product packaging is that it usually designed to be stacked and so should store nicely on shelving.

Take a look next time it comes time to toss stuff out, you might just find the perfect hobby storage bit.

Take care!

-Eli

WIP Dropship Conversion

I cranked this quick kitbash out while ago. After spending an eternity trying to find a good sized Batman Tumbler that I could easily cannibalize, I pulled the upper shell off and proceeded to slap this and that onto it. The engines are various prescription bottles. The overall vehicle includes kid's candy dispensers, 15mm WW2 weapons and assorted straws, tubes and other bits and pieces. It should be noted that this is before I paint it and that it is not a solid construction. It will never hold up to close scrutiny of close inspection, but it will look good sitting on the table.

The ship is supposed to represent an armored dropship or lander of some sort, perhaps even a mercenary/pirate pinnace or similar type of ship. The oddly angled rocket pods are supposed to be remote rocket mortars for supporting troops as they disembark from the ship. The figures shown are three of 15mm.uk's space mercenary figures.

 Enjoy,

-Eli

Dollar Store Find - Dinosaur Skeletons

One of the fun things about getting dragged around with the wife is that she doesn't mind me poking my head about in dollar stores or wandering off to other aisles while she is looking for this and that. Today I found these little gems at a local Dollar Tree.

The shadowy figure in between them is a short, 28mm druid figure. These figures may not be perfectly scaled but at $1 for two skeletons you can forgive a little sensationalist sizing. What's more, there are at least two other packs, though I did not pick them up. All three would provide you with a museum's worth of dino bones for a Pulp game. 

Take care!

-Eli 

Happy Gamer Daddy Moment #245

No, I don't really keep count, but there are a lot of them.

As a miniatures gamer who likes to do things on the cheap, I have a tendancy to collect recycled containers, packaging, and other interesting and "useful" shaped items. A week or so back, my kids and I did our typical payday visit to the local deli counter for a warm deli food take home lunch and we neded up with a couple of plastic snap-top bowls. Of course, I wanted to keep the bowls as they would make good building materials or storage for flocking, etc.

The fun part is that my youngest daughter (7) take the two lids and puts them together and starts to explain how I could build a flying saucer for my games. She ointed out that with the addition of some landing gear and one of the clear plastic bubbles from one of her gumball machine prizes it would look, "just right". She, of course, was absolutely spot-on and though I have no need fo a flying saucer just now, I am tempted to build one as proof of concept.

I am thrilled to have such wonderful design consultants.

-Eli

15mm Birch Trees - Part Two

It has taken me a bit to get around to finishing up this project. I had a couple of set-backs in the project trying to figure out what materials I had that would achieve the effect that I wanted but I finally came up with something that works. I have a tendency to rush through projects and make mistakes and have really had to fight those urges.

Onward!

After painting and mounting the trunks as I showed in the first post I set to building the tree tops. I realize in retrospect that this might have been better done as step three but with the trees being as tall as they are, I don't think that the tops will get in the way of the final detailing of the bases and lower trunks.

Gaming Models Samples Received



Back Row: Old Glory 15mm Wespe, Gaming Models T-35, Gear Krieg Loki, Gaming Models T-28, Old Battlefront Brumbar
Front: Converted Peter Pig WW2 Dutch LMG, True North Dutch Tankettes

This post is a bit overdue considering I received these models well over a week or more ago. I had been chatting with Craig over at Gaming Models about a particular turret variant of the T-28 which he did not currently have in his inventory just yet. When he had finished this variant, Craig was kind enough to offer me a sample at no charge. I accepted but boy did I get more than I bargained for.

Not only did Craig send me the T-28 but he also sent me a T-35 as well. In addition, he also included all the current main turret variants for both tanks. An amazing bounty for a free sample. The tanks and all their turrets were packed neatly into a foam tray, custom cut to fit the vehicles and shipped in a Priority Mail box. But I'm sure you are more interested in hearing about the tanks.

15mm Birch Trees - Part One

CONSTRUCTION

A while back I picked up a few cheap decorative bamboo/wicker place mattes from the local Burlington Coat Factory. They were clearanced so I picked up two, one in black and one in brown. You can get them other places by the way and they can often be found in your local dollar shop. I had no solid idea at the time, but they seemed like the sort of thing that would prove useful for some terrain project or another. Well, I recently started one.

It occurred to me that if I cut the mats cross-wise into three roughly equal strips, I would have literally hundreds of slightly curved, but mostly straight "trunks" for something like bamboo or the narrower deciduous trees. As I was going to need some trees for an upcoming 15mm project, I decided to do some deciduous trees. I have always liked the look of trees like birch, alder, and aspen and these trees can be found pretty much the world over so they seemed a good place to start.

Initially I tried to cut the pieces of wicker into their final lengths and then painting them but the process proved fiddly and slow. I have decided that it is best to paint them while they are still tightly in rows (as shown above) and then touch them up after cutting. I used to a light grey called "Lichen Grey" craft paint and simply stippled it here and there, making sure to be as random as I could and trying not to stay in a row. I found that it helped to jump around a lot, going from one place in the row to another until they have that mottled barky look with the combination of dark patches across mostly grey. A finally touch up with some off white added a little more depth to the effect (see below).

Once the trunks were painted, cut and touched up, I had several pieces between 4-5" long. Before I could do anything with these, I had to prepare a base. I decided that the first few stands would be smaller, oblong bit to add accent to boards rather than larger area pieces, so I took some oddly shaped bits of stiff card, in this case leftover islands from the Pirates of the Spanish Maine, and then glued about eight or so of the painted trunks into place. I tried to make sure that they weren't all standing straight up and down and included one of the more bent and curvy trunks in there for a bit of texture. I surfaced the base with some spackling compound and added a few pieces of ballast stone for texture and then set it to the side to dry (see below).

In the next installmen, I'll get into detailing and such. Until then, go forth and find your place mats.

-Eli

New Stuff From Gaming Models

Gaming Models seems to be on the ball. Since my initially finding the place and a few emails back and forth with Craig, there have already been a few new releases. Now, I had nothing to do with these releases, but they do show the sorts of things that Gaming Models offers. In this case it is a host of captured French vehicles in use by the Germans during WW2 as well as the anti-tank version of the RSO.

Mosto f these models have German rockets attached in one fashion or another and look very lovingly rendered.

Good stuff!

-Eli

P.S. Sorry for not including a link to Gaming Models' site in the last post. That has been corrected and a link included in this and all future post for the company.

Gaming Models - 15mm Tanks and Vehicles At Budget Prices (Link Added)

Hey all,

I have to say that I am shocked, amazed, and disappointed that I have never heard of Gaming Models until recently. While practicing the Interwar Tank kata of my Google-Fu I stumbled upon some pictures of a couple of pretty cool BT-7 tanks. This lead me to a review of several producers of said tank among which were those that had been featured in the picture I found. Following the links in the review I came upon Gaming Models.

Gaming Models is a small operation independent miniature vehicle producer that works specifically in 15mm and they have this to say about themselves on their home page -

"Gaming Models original sculptings are 15mm or 1/108th scale. These miniatures are made with the gamer in mind and are not intended to be fine scale models."

What does this mean? It means that they make nice-looking models at price that allows the gamer to buy more than a few without breaking the bank. Now, they are not likely to have as much detail as some of those others out there, but they aren't lacking much. I sincerely believe that their vehicles are more than adequate for the gaming table.

I will be honest, I do not own any of their miniatures yet, but I did look around online and asked around a bit and it seems they do a good job. You can read a good product over view review of their models at http://jeremy.nandgate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68&Itemid=65 as well as reviews and comparisons of their models against other manufacturers in severla other posts at the same blog. They have a ton of pictures and will get you up to speed well before I could get enough product to do a fair job of it myself.

I guess what stands out for me about Gaming Models is the value. You will get a good model that may need a bit of cleanup but it will only cost you $4 in most cases even for the biggest tank (T-35, Char 2C, Elephant, etc). They have sets of 16 15mm bunkers for $30. The line is also living and the artist communicated in an email to me that he was now more able to do new models which means expansions to the line soon. Heck, he's even open to wish lists, suggestions and requests.

One last note I can make is that the pictures in the galleries, though extensive do not show every vehicle in their inventory. I found that they had two versions of both the T-28 and T-35 in their catalog even though the pics only show one version.

I feel a shopping list coming on! Alcovia needs tanks!

-Eli

(Pictures from Game Models website. Used without permission for the purposes of spotlighting their product in this post.)