My biggest terrain project... so far

The 1/72 tabletop campaign soon reaches the walls of a fortress, so I had to come up with something imposing, yet practical. I have explained my problems with larger battles, and especially terrain, in 1/72 scale: the first compromise I had to make was building only one corner of the fort.

Farmstead

It's still not easy to represent built-in areas with larger scale figures. One way to solve this is creating fenced-off gardens and such. We've had this piece of plywood lying around, and I thought I could use it as a base for such a piece. There's a farm house, a stone well, a stable and a chicken coop included on it.

The buildings are made from figure boxes, the roof is decor rubber. The gates and columns are pine wood, the fence is balsa wood. The walls of the stable and the fence are covered in PVA and sand.

I've started painting with a layer of dark chocolate brown and used multiple highlights until reaching a gray/white on the fence and an off white on the buildings. The roof was drybrushed with saddle brown (sort of clay), then orange brown.

Civilians? On Random&Creative?

And by that I don't mean the recent surge of hits from Russia.
It's been a while since I purchased this set, I think from Drum&Flag on ebay, but only painted ten or so figures. The figures are all from the same IMEX 'Pilgrims' box. With the recent Formaggian villa build I thought I could paint some more, so here they are, doing various tasks around their two scratchbuilt cottages, the latter sort of just happened to be assembled and painted in an afternoon's work.

The Complete Ottoman Army

"OK, at this point he's really showing off", readers might say looking at the picture above, but don't forget that 1) there were already two posts that included some of the material above, 2) I'm never going to field all of these in one battle.

Let's make a final tally:

• 4 elephants (H&R)
• 8 guns with 32 crew (Baccus)
• 8+1 officers (including Cleric marker) (Baccus)
• 192 infantry (Baccus)
• 96 cavalry (H&R)
• 84 irregular infantry (H&R),

425 figures and models in total, maybe a bit larger than some European chunks of the collection, but not that huge, especially considering how fast I painted the H&R figures up. 

6mm buildings

The buildings I've had for 6mm battles were rather... experimental (I have too much fondness of them to say they were primitive or ugly). As the campaign area broadens, the architecture must also change, and a great deal was learnt about miniature house construction from the previous attempts.

What we have here was constructed in a day, including painting and basing. Eleven buildings altogether, with a few more in progress not shown. All of them are made of paper, the L-shaped big house has a match stick support for its roof. 

More 6mm stuff

More parts of the 6mm SYW / ImagiNations lot are completed - above, the two command stands for the Böhnstadter (left) and Flossian (right) armies. For the first game of Maurice, as advised in the rules, we're going to keep things simple so there will be no more officers and notables.

6mm buildings for 'Jazygia 1996'

Some fresh buildings off the treadmill, made for 6mm gaming. They are based on match boxes. The boxes are surrounded by thick paper and a cardboard roof.

Kinder 35mm Samurai + Zvezda Samurai WIP

 Some time ago I painted a Swiss figure from the Kinder eggs. These two are part of the same range of toys. There are 4 different Samurai figs, I'm still on the hunt for the other two. On the left one, I tried blending, while the one on the right had a shaded undercoat and was done with the traditional wash+drybrush way.

County mansion WIP#2

Still working on the building, painted and fixed the windows... I usually paint the windows in metal color but thought this would do as well, some paint&pencil on them while the doors are painted brown.

To scale with an 1/72 fig.

WIP - County mansion, Maered-style

When working at an IT company's warehouse this month (practically last month... it's September already?) I've received some gifts from the staff, one of them was a pretty nice plastic flask - and its box seemed useful for a new building. I've added a small tower to one side; it's a simple two-storey mansion.

Matches well to 1/72s I think. Well not perfectly but it can be reasoned with the less space taken on a table. Added paper 'bricks' to the ground floor with spaces for the windows. Basecoating and windows/doors to come, then something added to the base as well... Will keep me entertained.

Posting these WIP images has a second reason: to welcome two new 'followers', TamsinP and Olivr: thank you... 36 followers! 

Additions for the Risk game

A few minor scratchbuilds for the Nations of Riskopia game. The campaign's going on and there was a siege already but the gameplay requires some modifications on the rules. 

Above, fortifications out of matches. Been collecting the few the household uses and honestly, they never seem to be out of stock so why not have some fun with them? The river, by the way, is a very old build from last October.

Houses, there's 11 of them, the material is styrofoam and cardboard. Not so detailed but these are for gaming purposes and who would look at them that closely anyway?

Some plastic caps camouflaged as trees/wood markers, not very effective but useful for sure.

Additions for the colonial game

Here's some stuff I've put together for the upcoming colonial game. First, some packhorses. I didn't finish them earlier (honestly, there were no use for them until now), had been lying around for a while.

A couple of small naval guns made of cartridge cases.

The keep

Finished in all its might.

Some decent way to re-use kit boxes I'd say. 

I've had the roof from another scratch-build I hadn't used for the Viking game. Some decor paper on the windows, cardboard for the battlements on the top and a piece of A/5 paper where the four boxes' edges were too much visible.

You could see the first steps in this previous post. The next phase was to undercoat it black, then do the 'bricks' with white. Then came a layer of grey and then some drybrushing. Put sand on the base & painted it when the walls were already done. 

The blog just reached another thousand hits, thanks for everyone who's viewing!

WIP

Out in the garden not to splash everything with paints. This is a keep for a castle made of seven(!) plastic figure boxes. Well I had to use them somehow!

A very dirty basecoat is added and will work on it later.

More buildings

Twin houses, the material is the usual cardboard and... a sugar cube container box.

I'm running out of varnish so no muddy base this time, painted dark brown with acrylic.

Well this some sort of a filler post but a long weekend is ahead and I'll certainly finish something!

Jackewlinese limber team + Stable

Well, first things first. This is a rather, how to say, primitive way to model a stable. Well, this is what I got.

It's made from one of the spare kit boxes (a Zvezda one, I think), just some raw plans on the paper and it's done.

Also, a bit out of topic before moving on, but it seems from my latest acquisitions that Italeri re-issued some of their first series, just bought #6001 Scots Greys and #6004 Highlander Infantry (both being among the first 1/72s they've ever produced), the box stating they've been crafted in 2011, which is very good news! These re-issued sets come in boxes with yellow stripes (and a 'Wargames Approved' stamp on them), there were a bunch of early Russian grenadiers as well which I should use sometimes later.

And a warm welcome to Grimsi Grogs as a regular reader.

Painting diary XIX.

The weekend passed without internet, well I, after all, survived. Then, coming back to the hostel I realized I forgot the cables of my laptop, oh snap.
Objectives were set up on the miniatures' front on Friday:
-Base the South Dorroseani foot
-Assemble the yellow heavy dragoons
-Glue to caps and begin painting one more set
-Build at least three buildings and two workfields
of this, I managed to finish the two sets (posts will follow); one workfield, one building (a stable), and two blockhouses are WIP; glued a command fig and a horse, and the rest of the HäT Landwehr set onto caps; basecoated the Italeri Austrians; also a small progress on the Jackewlinese artillery.

A workfield made of cardboard.

These two are under construction. I put the doors on them later along with a roof for one and painted the windows.

Buildings and terrain

These also debuted on the winter campaign; a church, a small and a big house, minor in scale to the soldiers to take less place on the table. They're all scratch built from notebook covers and thick cardboard boxes.

Tents and more tents

These are the old tents, had about a dozen of them, most of which had gone to the bin for losing off their bases - thin cardboard and some copy paper, it had been a temporal solution as I had been setting up a training camp scenario.

The new ones, 10x6,5 cm rectangles carefully proportioned and cut out from a bit rougher paper (also with flips to hold on the base better). The base itself is a 8x8 cm thick (very thick) cardboard box - the quality of the picture is sad 'cause I made it with my cell phone [batteries of the camera depleted], it's in fact better than it looks on the pic. 

The next plan - waters and mills

Painting never seems to end, though I've got some other ideas in mind... First of all, to make my waters a bit more fit to the like. Actual material isn't either pretty nor very usable. So I got these thick papers for my cavalry bases: