Captain's Blog

There is one thing worse than painting miniatures, and that is to have unpainted miniatures. Captain's Blog will provide an audience, or in other words motivation, to stimulate my war game miniature painting productivity. In Halifax, we had a great group of gamers and we were constantly in competition with each other. I do not have the same community support in Montreal. I hope that by blogging regularly that I will force myself to paint more. Are you up to the challenge? Pick up a brush.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Three Pieces of Terrain

With this post I decided to showcase three homemade pieces of terrain. I was digging through my boxes of wargame supplies and felt that these should see the light of day.

1) Skull Mountain: This is intended to represent a possible stronghold. The piece was built up around a Grendel (or even older Fantasy Forge/Grenadier piece) resin cast cave entrance. Grendel is now part of Scotia Grendel Productions (/www.scotiagrendel.com/Products/) but I was unable to locate the piece on their website. They do offer a product that is similar in design, the Ram Skull Gate (ID 10014). The resin piece is 6.0 cm in width, 3.0 cm in depth and 7.0 cm in height. The actual entrance measures 2.5 cm x 3.5 cm x 4.0 cm.

Hero? Exit the Batcave. Figure 25mm for scale.

The entrance was attached to a artist board base roughly 20cm x 16cm in area. The hill was then built up using Styrofoam, covered with a thin layer of plaster, painted and flocked.

Darkness falls adding a more sinister apperance

2) Trench: This trench was my first attempt to create a 3D below ground tabletop piece for Warhammer 40K. I took a rectangular piece of styrofoam and roughly cut it in two. I then attached the two piece to an artist board base (38cm x17cm) separated by 2.5cm. Another two layers of styrofoam were added to build up the trench sides which were then coated with plaster.

Trench with Duck Boards

The top of the piece was flocked with a brown sand to give the impression of turned over or dug dirt. The lower half flocked with green for grass. A balsa wood duck board was placed in the bottom of the trench.The balsa was scored with a pencil to create planks and the "planks" were glued to two long runners.

Stand To just before dawn. Platoon 20 Modern Soviets for scale.

The total piece has an overall height of about 3.5 cm, with the trench having a depth of 2.5 cm. As you can see from the photographs, we have a very basic design. Overall I don't think the trench has enough depth, nor is it quite wide enough. As you can see from the photo even, these Platoon 20 modern Soviets are too exposed along the firing line.

3) Roman Palisade: My goal was to create an impressive table edge terrain feature.Once again I used an artist board base that was 50 cm long and roughly 13.5 cm wide. Again, a rectangular piece of styrofoam, cover in this case with paper towel soaked in plaster create the illusion of a low rise.

Palisade with Bean for scale (or Jack Bean in Gulliver's Travels)

The palisade itself was produced from standard wooden kitchen skewers. I cut the skewers in half using a pair of pliers. Thus only every second post is a sharpen stake, while the remainders are flat top. Each half of the fort is about 20 cm long. The skewer halves were then glued to balsa cross beams.

Unobstructed View (Front and Side)

A walkway was created from a double layer of balsa wood. The bottom layer was needed for support, and the top layer was scored with a pencil to have a "plank" effect. The walkway was glued to the top of the upper crossbeams and supported by dowel that was cut ti size. The gate was also made from balsa.