Cheap and Easy Ruins + Some Infantry

Continuing the project I began here, I coated two of the styrofoam-chunks-on-CD bases with black acrylic. 

Problem: The paint easily scrapes off of the CD surface.

Solution: Spread PVA (polyvinyl acetate. I used regular ol' Elmer's white glue) onto the CD, and let dry. THEN paint black on CD. Works like a charm.

Last night, I dry brushed with some light grey craft paint, and then an even dryer brush of the same paint but with white paint added (50/50).

Those cat hairs are not on your screen. Trust me.

I'm pretty happy with them, although they do not at all fit my usual style. It seemed silly to throw out the sytrofoam when my housemate had so much of it for free. I could probably cover a 3x3 table easily with the amount I have, maybe more.

I think, with the outer smooth level picked/scrapped/broken off, they could possibly make decent bocage as well. I have a definite "toy style" idea for that already, so I will likely stick to ruins.

Also pictured are the four Toy Soldiers of San Diego US infantry I have completed, so far, to go with my Britains. 

They were coated with PVA for primer, painted (mostly Vallejo, some craft), and then coated with PVA again for protection. I'll probably still hit them with Dulcoate - some pooled PVA in deep crevices got kind of shiny.

I dry brushed their bases to get them to match the Britains bases - not something I'd have done ordinarily, but they do blend in pretty well.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

A few weeks/month ago, I stumbled on a paper craft site that had a paper evergreen tree design, designed to be printed and cut on one of those automatic doo-dads (yes, doo-dad). The pieces were then assembled - the automatic cutting doo-dad presumably makes the pieces uniform so the edges match up.

The result is something like my Seussian trees, but with a much simpler assembly.

Then, a serendipitous acquisition of a discounted pack of shades of green cardstock at Michael's set the plans in motion: i would use my mechanical cutting doo-dad, i.e. scissors, and attempt to replicate the idea.

Behold:

Dawn patrol.

Just what I wanted!

What the above picture shows is 3 different trees, made by three different methods. And I have tried many more. I'm not uber-concerned with ratty, not perfectly aligned edges (from wargaming distance they aren't noticeable) but I am looking for a faster method to make each tree, so I can really crank them out.

As an aside, the great downfall of the craft foam Seussian trees is how long they take to assemble.

One method I hit upon, that seems to work well is illustrated below:

Here is a real-life example:

 At first my plan was to use it as a simple triangle, no "boughs."

If this was a mid-century modern wargaming setup, maybe that would be fine, but to me it looked like a paper airplane on end.

So, a few snips of the mechanical cutting doo-dad and voila!

They mix in well with my craft foam trees, so I haven't lost that effort. At minimum, I'm shooting for a dozen trees, but two dozen is probably ideal. 

At 1-2 sheets of cardstock, depending on the width, I can make something like 50-100 trees, at a cost of $0.03 usd  to $0.06 usd, per tree!

The Upside-Down Flintrubble Bubble Cake (Not Really)

I found myself with an abundance of packing Styrofoam (the bead-y kind, not peanuts or anything) and I knew that I would do something with it, I just didn't know what.

That was, until I saw this video from TheDungeonMasterG on making "no-trouble rubble."

He makes a pretty small disk to mount the rubble on, but he's working with 28mm minis, I'm working with 1/32 figures. So, CDs it is!

I'm clearly not done yet (painting black and grey/white dry brushing remain), but you can get the idea:

The wooden "beams" are fireplace matchstick pieces

I suppose if I was playing a Stalingrad scenario or something and snow was on the ground, these would work as is. 

In retrospect, I'm not a huge fan of the round basing for the rubble,but I have a ton of blank CDs I'll never use for anything.

New Construction

Although I should be working on getting The Purple Worm Graveyard notes together for Saturday, instead I've been working on this project that began on a whim two weeks ago or so:

Here it is with the roof, primed with gesso:

Not quite done yet - here's s a far as I got today - the building is ready to be painted, but the roof needs the tiles drawn in yet. I really do need to get my stuff together for Saturday's D&D session, so it will stay in this state awhile longer.

That lower window looks a little more Mondrian than I'd like.

Beginnings of a Seuss-ian Forest

In addition to assembling copies of the new zine, I've been experimenting with craft foam scenery. 

Now, I have an admittedly strange aesthetic preference on the game table, compared to what is portrayed as the norm in the hobby publications, and I recently decided to embrace it - my table won't appeal to those who strive for realism. But, as I had to remind myself, it's for me not for others.

These trees began as something of a joke, a Dr. Seuss inspired design -leaning, bending, twisting unnaturally - and were built using an idea I liked once before but abandoned foolishly when a Hobby Lobby discount got me some model railroad type trees for cheap. 

The joke was on me; when i finished the first one, I was in love.

Pictured with cat for scale. Oh and a 1/32 Airfix German Infantry and a 1/35-ish Classic Toy Soldier Pz. IV

Like I said, they won't appeal to everyone.

I will use the same technique to make 1/72 sized trees, although I probably won't Seussify them. Getting the extreme curve in the tree farthest back turned me into a glue-covered mess. I shudder to imagine trying to do it with pieces 1/2 the size.

I am shooting for a dozen of these to start - more are likely as they are cheap and, with the exception of extreme curves, easy to make with just craft foam and glue. 

They're fairly sturdy too, and easily mended should the pieces separate. To make the extreme curve, I used a stable pushed into the piece from the opposite side and may make that a regular part of assembly.

Deciduous trees are next on the list, I have multiple ideas for those.

There's Foam in That Thar Hill!

Inspired by an article on the rarely-if-ever-updated TerraGenesis, I decided to make a hill out of a scrap of open-cell furniture foam left over from an aborted attempt at building my own figure carrying cases (I now use divided plastic boxes - once i accepted the reality that I don't travel with my figures it was a no-brainer to ditch the foam).

First I hacked the shape using a pair of scissors and then painted the whole thing with CeramCoat Dark Brown. I had gotten a bad bottle which I finally abandoned all attempts at using, but had yet to throw away, and figured this was as good a use as any. It pretty much kicked the bottle.

Painting foam < > Easy.

I used a large brush, itself made of foam, to "push" the paint into the furniture foam.

I then dry brushed with another unused color  in my pile, Americana Cocoa. I think i bought it as a potential color for my WWII Japanese, but ended up using Folk Art's Rusty Pipe instead. In any case, I found I couldn't actually dry brush the foam and instead painted it on where I wanted it.

Since the foam absorbs paint, there was no worry it'd go on too heavily.

What appears to be coarse texture, by the way, is the foam itself. Which you can see better here:

Of course, a brown step-hill looks kind of like a mesa of some sort. I couldn't decide how I wanted to handle the top - painting it the color of my game board seemed logical, except, the table is decidedly "old school" in color and the hill leans a bit more towards the "model train" approach ("leans", not "is").

I dug out some felt, traced the top of the hill, trimmed it up a bit and voila!

*EDIT: The felt is not permanently affixed.  Thus, I can use the hill in multiple environments.

Here's some troops up on the hill:

It's unlikely this hill would see use in GNW-era battles but you never know.

I am rather pleased with the result, although the hill cover, for when I want it to represent a grassy hill, might better work if I simply painted a piece of felt with the same paint as my tabletop.

My favorite part is that it can be squashed to no ill effect. 

I can fold, bend, twist and otherwise contort the hill without fear of damage, meaning that storage of several foam hills in a space smaller than required for the same number of rigid hills is a good possibility.

It's also available in 3" and 4" thicknesses, which would work quite well with my 1/32 WWII games.

That said, for my horse and musket games, I'd really like the hills to have a clean cut edge - the rocky look is fine for WWII / Sci-Fi / Colonial but not what I am aiming for with my GNW project. I intend to pick up some more foam to see if using a knife gives the desired look.

A Toy-style House for About a Dollar

1/32 WWII U.S. Figures by TSSD

Materials: foamcore, white glue, white gesso (to seal the foamcore and more importantly to give it some texture), cheap-o craft paint (mixed with a lot of water to make a translucent stain), an ultra-fine Sharpie (my writing implement of choice)

Total time: about 60 minutes from start to finish over two days - that includes waiting for layers of the "stain"to dry. Most of it was done today during my lunch break. 

The roof is removable and there is a "floor" so figures can be placed on the 1st or 2nd level.
 

I know it's not for everyone, but the look is exactly what I was going for : toy-like and functional. Plus, I can knock out a bunch of these as needed with relative ease.

I hope to get it out on the table tonight for a small skirmish - possibly a replay of the Nuts! 2.0 core rules infantry scenario. I do need to hack together a suitable stone wall from some foam core (an L-shaped assembly, painted grey and using the Sharpie to indicate stones) but that won't take long.

Gaming Surface Materials Acquired.

I picked up two sheets of 2' x 4' x .25" MDF and about 24 oz. of Behr "Rolling Hills" paint on Saturday.

The paint color seems suitably "old school" to me, but I may be quite wrong on that issue. Still, it evokes a "toy" feeling in me when I look at it and that's the effect I'm after. Of course, it may look rather different when there's 16 square feet of it staring me in the face.

As projects go, this is relatively inexpensive:

• MDF - $5.95 USD a sheet ( 2 total)
• Paint - $2.94 USD per pot ( 3 pots total - quite more than necessary)

My total (tax excluded) - $20.72

We already have the paint rollers, although I will need to pick up a paint pan liner, unless a sheet of aluminum foil will do the job.

The plan is simply to rest these sheets on my desk (which is, by its design, a 3' x 5'  kitchen table),on our actual kitchen table (same dimensions) or even the floor. When not in use, the MDF will be stored underneath a sofa or the bed, conveniently out of sight. The latter part pleases the Lady Shadowmoss, which is never a bad thing.

Depending on my confidence in the stability of the MDF where it overhangs the table, I may pick up a third sheet to allow me to field as large as 4' x 6' playing area. 

Painting should commence sometime this week. I look forward to having a surface from which I can brush away the cat hair with ease.

Sharpie Addiction + 15mm Sci-Fi Interior

I've been on a Sharpie kick the last month or so - the Ultra Fine Point to be exact. I purchased it to do black lining, but I love it for writing. I look for excuses to write things on paper, just to use one. 

It just feels fun when I use it.

As I mentioned in my last post, I found a use for the card stock scraps I'm producing modeling the T-34 (my mock-up is being done with 65 lb stock) :  making a sci-fi interior. 

Combine the two (you were wondering where I was going with this Sharpie thing weren't you?) and you get something like:

"Hey, Lou, what's with that weird tree-like thing?"
"Beats me, Joe Probably some joker trying to give the joint atmosphere."

"Spacious unfurnished studio located in the heart of a Control base. 1st, last, security. Pets OK. This one will go fast!"

It won't win any awards, but it's functional and puts some of the otherwise wasted card stock to use.

Not to mention it's an excuse to use the Sharpie.

The corridor wall started out as a rectangle 90mm wide, as long as the scrap piece (in this case, 135mm). I folded it in half and then folded out the bottom 15mm on each side (the cross section is an inverted 'T')  to make feet so the wall section stand on its own. I then glued the wall together so it stays closed. 

The result is a 30mm x 135mm corridor section.

The corridor floor, another scrap, rests on the feet.

The room is just a 75mm x 75mm x 30mm box, folded from another piece of scrap. This is probably a good deal larger than I'd like to go for a room in the base. I'm thinking 50mm for the longest edge - and if I'm going to doodle on the interior, I need to do it before I fold it. 

Thoughts About Scale and a Test

The recent holiday afforded me much time to think about gaming - especially the flight home yesterday as the Young Lord Shadowmoss slept soundly in my lap.

Particularly, I was contemplating the use of 1/32 for gaming. There is an allure to these larger sized figures that I find irresistible. 

At the beginning of the year I had planned to build the GNW project to Morschauser's Horse and Musket specifications using 1/32 figures, but the combined lack of suitable, and inexpensive, figures and the beauty of Zvezda's 1/72 offerings changed that. Still, the idea refused to die entirely.

Given limited gaming space I have,  it would seem that such an undertaking (using 1/32) would be doomed to failure for all but skirmish. Except that Bob Cordery's various gridded games demonstrate that this isn't necessarily so - the # of figures per space matter not, and the ranges are greatly compressed to make it possible in relatively little space. Memories of my own early gaming (low those 6 or 7 years ago) which utilized 25mm movement and firing ranges with 54mm figures (it was Old West skirmish) reminded me that compression of ranges can be done without a grid and the games were great fun to boot.

I have already played some 1/32 WWII Eastern front grid-based games, and save the size of space required for a tank, found it quite enjoyable. Grid-less has also proven enjoyable with 1/32 figures even on a 3x3 space - either 1:1 squad skirmish, or with 3-5 figures to represent a section or platoon. With my planned 4 x 4 table I suspect I can play 1:1 up to a platoon, and use 1:5 or 1:10 for larger scale games.

Buildings at this scale prove difficult. And this was the idea that struck me on the flight home yesterday. 

Taking my cue from Morschauser, who noted that we reduce both the scale of the buildings and the number of buildings on our table top to represent a village, town, or city, as well as several web sites that suggest slimmer/shorter doors and windows, I bashed together the "buildings" below:

This picture is propaganda. The actual battle was of Russian assaulting the town from the woods in the foreground. The Germans occupied the buildings, including an HMG in the church tower.

Given the little time it took to create this village - perhaps 30 minutes start to finish, I hope you're inclined to forgive the flaws and instead see the potential. Sturdier pieces, particularly for the larger buildings, can be made of foam core, although card stock seems to work well for the ruined corner sections. 

The compressed size didn't effect my fun in the least and it was nice to have more than one building on the table and at the correct scale at that. It is decidedly more toy-like but when I am gaming with WWII figures in this scale, I'm typically invoking memories of my childhood and playing with green plastic army men.

I am heartened by the success of this experiment to pursue it further with better, longer lasting, materials.

Yet Another Monthly Goal Post

June was somewhat laid back compared to prior months. In addition to several solo games and an excessive number of posts here, I completed the following:

My goal was 14 15mm figures, and I did 13 (although several not among those I intended):

The expedition

The Russian priest, Fr. Alexi and the British explorer, Sir Harry

This guy is itching for a fight. You don't want to scratch that itch.

I was shooting for one dozen palm trees, and I finished with nine, although many of these still need paint on the leaves/fronds:

A view of several palm trees - completed and not quite.

 More 15s:

 Commander Kropotkin (one figure, many uses) leading a squad of Sepulvedan Resistance fighters.

 1/72 scale paper Shermans - I only need four and not the six I thought:

 

The Japanese artillery:

 

A camouflaged Japanese bunker:

USMC Artillery:

For July, I'm going to try to post just 10 times (so 9 more), which will put me over my goal of 100 for the year. 

I started a 10 figure French Zouave unit for G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. in June but I'm finishing those up over the next day or so and they'll count towards July. I'd like to get my Khurasan salamander unit painted, maybe the remaining Zouaves (many of them have broken bayonets which I'm not sure how to fix well) too, but if not then at the very least the 3 remaining porters and the 2 British soldiers - I'm gearing up for a return to Jimland (probably the first set of "wargame" rules I really loved).

Finally, I have a couple of paper pill boxes to finish up and then I can play the Pacific Assault game as described in Lone Warrior #172. I'm sure I'll also play out the next game in my Helvetica campaign and Goldielocks scenario, and do some solo RPGing, either with the Annwyn Investigations campaign or a pre-written dungeon crawl with Mythic to throw me curves.

And what the heck, for wishful thinking, cleaning and priming the first box of figures for the Great Northern War project.

Hobby Lobby Coupon Alert!

While on the Hobby Lobby on-line store this morning to order some pencils and a sketchbook (I have decided I want to learn to draw - just for fun), I discovered they're having a 40% off any one item sale AND $3 flat rate shipping.


So, in addition to the pencils and sketchbook (both inexpensive), I ordered some model trees which I got for 40% off! 


I know I said previously that I'd use paper trees, but that was in comparison to cake decorating trees. At a $1.50 a tree, I'm willing to get the pre-made model trees that look nice. 


There's also a 40% off coupon good for in-store purchases available for printing www.hobbylobby.com as well. I may go and do an in-store purchase of a new decent paint brush, if I have time tomorrow.


The sale expires on December 10, 2011.

To tree or not to tree

I've been thinking a lot about trees lately.

Don't you wish your life was this exciting?

After looking at my AAR photos from my Nov. 1 zombie game, I'm reminded of my dissatisfaction with my lack of appropriate foliage for non-tropical locales. As DIY as they are and happy with my trees as I am when gaming a battle on the surface of Venus in 1889 or on a recently discovered island off of Africa's coast in 1885, they have the wrong look for the forests of France in 1944.

Now, believe me, I'm not looking for "realism" in my miniature battles - I use pieces of felt to dictate the area covered by woods and use step-type hills. I use paper flats when I play fantasy games (rpg or Chronicles of Blood). And how many identical figures do I have in a given unit? Unless they're either clones or brothers, it's far from realistic. 

And, yet, all of this works for me (at least at some level. I really have trouble with not seeing a figure=1 man). But the wrong type of trees? Unacceptable.

Let's chalk this up to a character quirk.

In any case, and before I start to sound more than a little nutty,  I've decided I want to do pine/evergreen and I'm considering the following options:

• Cake decorating trees
• Some variation of paper flat trees

The front runner? Paper trees. Yes, paper trees. Oh how I do love irony! 

That and there's something about paper flats and models that appeals to me. Yet another character quirk.

While there are a couple of commercial products over at Wargamevault, I really like the style (and price:free!) of Oversoul's Forest (the link is about 2/3s down the page).My primary concern is the ink consumption for my deskjet. Since I have no intention of covering the table in a one-to-one  replica of the Ardennes forest, this may not be as big an issue as it seemed to me at first brush.

I've also got some ideas to work around this issue using green card stock, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to do a feasibility test. Never mind where to get a decent weight green card stock. 

In the meantime, assuming I have a chance to game any time soon, I think I may dig out those weird looking semi-flat plastic trees that came with the cheap bag of dinosaurs I got for Christmas a few years ago.