New Galleys and Sea Mat

Here's the first group shot of my 1/1200 scratchbuilt/homecast galleys, on a piece of dark blue cotton cloth (size 140x100cm) I got from a haberdashery. I also included an Ark Royal Indiaman for scale, and a pair of stones from Corfu Island - I'll use these as islands or barren sea rocks for my games.

From left to right, the vessels are the following:

• Standard galley with Imperial Habsburg/Spanish flags, sails up, inspired by romanticized paintings where the two sails are looking at the opposite directions for maximum wind power. This is a resin copy.
• Turkish galley of the 'Old' hull type, a bit more diminutive than the standard hull, sails furled. She's got balsa oars instead of resin ones.
• Standard galley of the Knights of Malta, there is a Maltese cross on the other side of the sail
• Venetian Galeass, as you can see she's on a larger base too. This is the master model, I made four more casts.
• French galley of the 'old' hull type, with added balsa superstructure (forecastle and oar banks), and a single mast.
• Another Turkish vessel, standard type, sails furled.

As you can see there is plenty of space for customization. Next I will do galiots, lanternas and ships with striped sails. There is also a larger (1/300ish) version in the pipeline with removable parts when damaged.

I'm not really content with the rigging, but for 1/1200 scale I will give them a pass.

In case you are interested, I also made amendments to my Block Galleys rules - you can find them under the Rules page of the blog.

Santa Claus to the Rescue

I've long wanted some wheeled pieces of scatter terrain to decorate my gaming table. The main trouble is, wheels in the proper scale are hard to come by. When I was at the Vasa Museum in March I contemplated buying some 25mm pewter cannon sold at the museum shop for such a purpose, then put the idea off. Later, when I received a plastic Warlord Marlburian WSS gun, I tried to make copies of the wheels, but the space between spokes of the copies was too narrow, even for my sharp needle files.

In the meantime I built some barricades and other scatter terrain which I posted here, and then, come pre-Christmas sales of decorations, my wife and I went to a local Interspar and she pointed out this lasercut Santa Claus train which was at half price and had no less than eighteen wheels per set, all well scaled for 28mm figures!

I promptly bought two sets for the total princely sum of about five Euros, so now I have all the wheels for a lot of hand and horse carts, even perhaps a Gulay-Gorod for my Cossacks.

You can see the first three items built of my newly found resources, a wheelbarrow, a small hand cart and one with a resin barrel attached, assembled, placed on 30mm round bases and coated with PVA.

The First Cossacks Assembled

I managed to assemble, base and prime the first three Cossacks out of the dozen originally intended. The master is in the center, with a bardiche in hand (a Bloody Miniatures metal Lochaber axe with the hook trimmed off); a pikeman in helmet (with a Bloody Miniatures head swap) is on the left, and a sergeant in a large fur hat, a partisan (Bloody again) and a drawn saber (sculpted along the scabbard) on the right.

The loss of detail with the press mould is minimal now that I cast the lower arms separately, and as you can see with a small variation in weaponry, headgear and/or hand positioning I can avoid all of them looking the same. 

Cossack Test Casting #1

Join me today as I create a two-piece press mould for the Cossack pikeman from the previous post, using Blue Stuff. 

First thing to do is The Coffin. It might look a bit creepy for the poor sod, but the point is to have the two parts of the mould fit as snugly as possible. Press moulds are going to have a lot of flash no matter what, as the material has to go somewhere, so we do this to prevent any excess.

Many people use Lego bricks for The Coffin, but I just superglue this hard foamboard, using the original dimensions of the master as a guide, to a sort of brick shape, with the top open. I also cut a piece that is the size of the aperture, to apply pressure later when both sides of the mould are set in place.

Cossack Pikeman Master Sculpt

 

Here's a short WIP post to show what I'm working on. This is the master for a Cossack warrior, intended to hold a pole weapon, which I will replicate using a two-piece press mould, something I'm quite proficient at by now.

The figure itself uses the body of a Warlord WSS artillerist, and head and arms from the Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago plastic crewmen set. The rest (including moustache and hair) I sculpted with Magic Sculpt, making the original torso a bit bulkier and lengthening the bottom of the overcoat. 

TYW Cuirassiers

Here are a few snapshots of four recently completed 28mm scale mounted figures, two Empress lobsters and two Warlord plastic demi-cuirassiers. I mixed them up to make a three-figure unit in Pikeman's Lament, with one extra rider. I have six more Warlord plastic riders, three of which will be mounted Mousquetaires and three Finnish/Swedish galloper cavalry.

Light conditions aren't optimal for photography right now, but I tried my best.

Floyet House WIP #1

On my 'auxiliary' Battle Campaigns blog I hinted at a mini-campaign, comprising five scenarios, which would culminate in the siege of a fortified house. 

Thus I've started building the house in question, a distant relative of the Hungarian hussar fort, the Romanian cula and the English/Scottish borderland bastle house. This will be the most ambitious of my cardboard buildings so far, being quite large in 28mm scale, with a playable interior, LED lights, and many other features.

Flossian Union Foot Battalions

The lesson of this post is that the most important thing about painting miniatures is not to stress oneself out over the matter. It is a leisure activity after all, and the great majority of us don't paint for a living. 

I found out that I still had more than five hundred(!) 1/72 eighteenth century figures from various produce, and since I sort of hit a painter's block with my TYW/ECW collection, these came in handy for a change. Some were painted and needed touching up only, some were primed and some just bare plastic. 

I did not really have a plan for them, until I made the mental connection with my Schultze-Böhnstadt Imagi-Nations setting, so here they are, three dozen figures in three battalions of the Flossian Union: a regular fusilier, a mercenary Glambrian and a local militia unit.

The Tiny Monkey Inn

I have a terrain-heavy seventeenth century 28mm skirmish project in mind, titled "Dark Nights in Trashburgh." It is mainly inspired by the Alatriste and Fortune de France books, and centers on urban combat, a sort of baddies vs. catchpoles/upright civilians type of game.

(The project title derives, obviously and sort of unintentionally, from Strasbourg, but it's also a sort of ironic reflection that most things we use for scratchbuilding would otherwise usually end up in the litter.)

For this, obviously, I need more buildings than the single guardhouse I built before, so I planned a few: an enlarged version of the old gatehouse I started in 1/72 scale, a multi-storeyed rich citizen's estate and a wattle and daub style inn, with accomodations on the upper floor(s). Some of these would have internal lighting and games could be played at night or dusk, using the light from the windows, bonfires, tokens with built-in LED torches etc. This is the first installment of the series.

As with most scratchbuilds, doing the inn was an on and off type of thing, with large intervals waiting for the glue and primer to dry, then shelving it for something else, all the while contemplating the next thing to do, but finally it turned out to be a rather handsome building. The most interesting and at the same time tiring part of such builds is to think well ahead about the construction process.

I started this project with my wife and the tiny monkey is sort of a catchphrase between us, hence the name plate of the establishment.