Woods for the trees

While I have not been busy posting this past year, I have at least been busy doing a few things. So trying to catch up, this is something I did last summer.

Now the vast majority of my trees have for about two decades been by K&M Trees. They are mounted on resin tree stumps by Snapdragon Studios. Do not bother searching online for the later… they have unfortunately been out of business for around 1 ½ decades.

I always wanted to be able to arrange them into a forest in a way that their bases formed a continuous area, to allow people to tell, what is a forest and what is only a single tree. To achieve this, I glued them onto hexagonal card coasters. Those were cheap (got them for free at a liquor store) and allowed them to be arranged as a continuous area.

But as you can hopefully see in the picture above, this caused a few problems. For one, when you placed the trees with the bases touching, they were unrealistically close to one another. It also meant that you had problems placing infantry in between the trees. If you lifted single trees out, you would always disturb the ones next to them. This would lead to me hardly arranging them this way. Also, with just static grass the bases looked a bit uniform, dull and unrealistic. And last, the edges would curve up over the years, which always made the edges of the bases stand out.

So over the years, I started craving for an improvement. It would have been easiest to simply get me some laser cut MDF hexagonal bases with a larger diameter and do some more groundwork on them, but I wanted to take it a step further.

So I decided to go the sabot way. A base for multiple trees (called the forest base from now on) into which you can place the individually based trees. These are available on the market, but I decided against those for various reasons. Since I wanted to use my own trees, those that came with tree models or did not have the right diameter were ruled out. Same goes for those made from resin, which are generally quite expensive, ruling them out for my needs. In the end nothing generally available did fit my needs. So I turned to Warbases and asked them for some custom forest bases. Which they were able to provide fast and cheap (and as an added bonus with holes for magnetising).

I asked for a very basic almost rectangular design that would either hold three bases with my large trees or six for small model rail road trees (representing saplings or young trees). Since the forest bases are two layers of 2mm MDF they were quite thick which would in turn make them stand out. But everything else was perfect meaning the only preparation still required was adding magnets and sanding the edges down. To speed things up, I used a sanding disc on a disc grinder… very messy work.

So after removing the old bases, filler, static grass, the trees were rebased, a forest floor flock and static grass as well as flower tuffs and bushes added. I did not take photos of the progress, so here are the final results.

As you can see, I also bought some large model railroad trees (birches and popular trees) to break up the monotony as well as a bunch of smaller birches to create some forests more typical of some regions in Russia.

As mentioned before, the trees can be removed to allow easier placement of minis or even tanks.

I also did some bases with just some tree stumps in case I want some bases to appear more open or to hide those brown sabot areas. More bases like these will follow. Those will simply feature some flowers bushes and maybe small mossy rocks.

Above are a few bases to show the individual details. There are three or four trees that were to large for even the large version of the forest bases so these were just based as individual trees, but in the same style.

I will now leave you with some photos of them arranged as larger forests. More can be seen in the previous post from our last game.

I will probably put some iceland moss at the edges of the forests in the future. You usually have more undergrowth at the edges of forests (where there is the most light) and this will both signal the edge of the forest and blend the bases in at the same time.

 

Overhauling the paint cart (part 1)

First of all, sorry for the lack of posts. It is not like I have been idle.

A couple of weeks this summer were spend rebasing my trees and working on my forrest multibases. And there is also a fair amount of minis I painted for Marvel Crisis Protocol.

So why are there no new articles? Well I was having a good flow and did not take photos before our holidays last month. And right now I cannot take any to accompany an article.

The central heating in the house needed replacement and my hobby room serves as storage for everything in the cellar that had to be moved out of the way while the old one was removed (including cutting apart the oil tank) and the boiler room replastered in places and painted. Good news is things should be moving out of my hobby room later this week, but right now I cannot get near anything to take some photos.

So here is something small that I can show you pictures of. Almost ten years ago I build my own paint cart. Over the years it has performed a stalwart service as intended. The years are beginning to show with a few scratches and drops of paint here and there, as well as a general discolouration. These things will be addressed next spring when I will sand it off and give it a new coat of varnish (or paint it). The more urgent problem has become space though. Back then, there was so much empty space for paints, I could hardly believe I would ever run out. But this year it happened. I guess all the different periods combined with my addiction to have all required shades without having to mix them, led to me buying way too many paints over the years. Well not too many per se… just too many for the cart. 😚 All drawers were filled to the brim and in some cases I even had to put paints onto the dividers a to had them in their appropriate drawers. So a solution needed to be found.

For a short while I thought about building a new cart and repurposing this one. But I never really liked the idea to build something new, when the old was completely useable. And in the general wood shortage this summer I had problems finding boards of oak in my desired size. (Before someone asks… the markets in the United States and China paid above premium prices for timber last winter, so suppliers sold their raw timber there which led to high demand here in Gemany a couple of months later.)

As you can see in the picture above the biggest problem in the drawers are actually the dividers, which take up a substantial amount of space. All in all they only allowed for five rows of eleven paint pots in total per drawer and even in those rows space was not used effectively.

The solution that came to my minds was replacing the wood strips I used as deviders with laser cut MDF. I contacted Warbases (one of my two favourite manufacturers for laser cut MDF) and gave them my specifications for some custom work. I picked them up in person during our holidays in Scotland and fitted them after our return. The results were perfect and they fit into the drawers like a hand into the glove.

As a result each drawer now fits seven rows of ten paint pots (or twelve of the new acrylic washes and filters by Ammo by Mig). In other words each drawer can now hold (at least) fifteen more pots and I have extra space for another 90 pots in the cart. Just to bring the idea home. The picture above is the same drawer with the same mount of paint pots (plus one extra pot) and one can see how much space there is left. Let’s see how long this lasts! 😉

 

French Village

Now on to the second large project for this summer and even a larger one, than the modern US terrain.

Over the past few years one thing became increasingly clear to me… I wanted build up areas, that actually felt like a village or small town, instead of just some MDF buildings tossed onto the table. 

Now long term followers of this blog will know that I have never been too happy with my 4Ground buildings due to them being easily recognisable and their proliferation across the world. Other buildings rather have a feeling like they they fit a loose hamlet. Yet others by Sarissa simply lack the footprint to give the weight I would like to see on my gaming table.

While I do have a 3D printer that I use for terrain and vehicles, I often still prefer MDF over prints. Now over the years I have grown increasingly fond of Charlie Foxtrot Models for several reasons. Colins models are fairly cheap, yet well thought out and detailed. And most importantly they all have individual features and offer a realistic footprint. So for that reason, the majority of models for this project came from Charlie Foxtrott.

But let’s start with those that did not. The first is Sarissa Precision’s Café Gondree from the Warlord Games Pegasus Bridge set. The kit itself is nice, but took a lot of work to get painted, due to all the small trim and such. I left the majority of the shutters off. While the sheets had been complete, I was still missing one shutter. So in the end, I decided to leave most of, instead of a single half shuttered window stand out. Main problem for me is the size of the building. Having been there I know that the original building is not gigantic either, but this one feels just too small (and I think caters to the short ranges in Bolt Action). But it should make a nice addition to my Pegasus Bridge as well as serving as a generic building for many western European set ups.

The other one is by Sarissa as well, this time their La Belle Alliance for the Waterloo campaign. I bought this, when I still had the time to paint Napoleomics, but have now decided to use it as a rather generic building. Maybe for the edges of a village or as part of a farm complex. Anyway, not wanting to use it in its historical role, gave me some liberties. So I added a fieldstone foundation and door / window beams, plastered up the walls and gave it all a good weathering with oil paints.

Now before I start with the completely new additions, I also made some addition to the last buildings of Charlie Foxtrot Models, namely some backyards. Again, the walls were plastered up (where appropriate) and weathered using oil paints. The plaster and oil paints will be a feature on all the following models as well, so I am going to omit that from here on. The sacks are from Stronghold Terrain if I remember correctly. The pile of firewood is simply cut up twigs.

When I did the shops the other year, I only gave them some light airbrush weathering, But I liked the oil paints version better and wanted to tie them all together, so I brought their weathering up to date as well.

When I bought the first batch of Normandy row houses from Charlie Foxtrot, I left the Brasserie out. Not sure why. At first look I did not like the building, but in the end I decided to add it to the collection. Which was a great idea, since it is as great as the other shops.

What is left now are the row houses. Obviously every village needs space for people to live in and I really liked the row houses from Charlie Foxtrot. Getting four of these is supposed to give my village what I am aiming for… gravity.

Obviously using the same large building four times means that I run the risk of it all looking cookie cutter style. To reduce that effect I made sure that all the backyards look as different as possible. The outhouses and sheds are by Charlie Foxtrot, the cold frame and chicken coop, as well as most of the chickens, are by another of my favourite companies, Warbases. And yes, I know that brick walls were not too common in Normandy, but I simply liked the brick version so much better than the plain one.

My favourite part though, is the Desire Ingouf. Once I had started on it, it became apparent that this would be a special piece. So in addition to the plaster, I also added a stone base from pink foam (which replaces the original laser engraved ones), roof tiles and custom signs / roads signs (not designed by me though)

To round it all off, I added new roads to it all, which you can see all through those post. Almost exactly a year ago (funny side story… while also on holidays in Scotland and staying in the same place I am writing this now) I stumbled about really nice cobblestone roads by Slug Industries. They were originally a Kickstarter, but if you contact Phil, he still has the moulds and sells them. They are really nicely designed and were easy and fast enough to paint. I also made some connector pieces to allow me to connect them to my existing hardened and dirt roads.

So all in all, I hope to have achieved my goal… to create a village that looks substantial and has gravity.

 

House Hunters Russian Edition

While I have some houses set in rural Russia for the Napoleonics to WWII era, it seems there never were and never are enough. So some time ago I decided to beef this up. Buying the models had been the easy part, actually building and painting them took ages it seems. So in order of their purchase dates, here they are:

Up first is a Russian Orthodox Church. Now these days there are a number of extremely nice MDF kits out there and I would be hard pressed to decide which one to use, but back when I decided to beef the numbers up there were none. So I decided to take a different route and use the Perry’s ACW plastic Church kit. I scraped off the Christian cross above the entrance, which sounds easier as it was without damaging the wooden planks, and replaced it with one laser-cut from MDF. The cross is by a small UK company. Unfortunately I can not remember their name to give them credit. The regular roof on the bell tower was left off and the resulting square hole shut off using a piece of plastic card. The onion shaped dome is from Fenris Games. All that was left to do was paint it. In real life there is more contrast to the wooden planks and also some greenish stains, but it seems the natural light when so took the photos nearly soaked that up (same also applies to the other buildings in this post).

Russian church

Russian church

Up next is the windmill. In a way this is kind of a kitbash as well. The basic windmill is by Warbases. I replaced the original tool with coffee stirrers, since I wanted a real simple roof there. Since I wanted it to be raised and of a kind that was able to turn with the winds I constructed an under structure from wooden strips and Hirst Arts stones. To make it all accessible I added a ladder from the same company that provided me with the Orthodox cross. I know a set of stairs would probably have made more sense, but this is easier to store and there is a door up on the rear side for lifting goods into the mill anyway, so a ladder had to do.

Russian windmill

Russian windmill

Up Last are two razed buildings. These are extremely nice kits from Charlie Foxtrot (you are going to see a few more of their models over my next posts). I really love their chimney stacks. They really add something to the looks of these burned down buildings. I build these two sets pretty straight forward assembling the buildings and painting them. They come with lots of separate planks and so on to allow you to mimic rubble and I decided not to paint these. Since they were thin strips of MDF they already looked suitably scorched as it was. So these were just filed in after the painting. Now once it was I all glued together this proved to be a mistake, since they looked immensely different from the way I had painted the rest of the buildings. The original plan had been to give the edges of the buildings a quick black spray with the airbrush and give it all a light black dusting to back it blend, but I realised that this would not do the trick. Something else would be needed. So I treated it all with a candle, making sure it left soot marks over the building and rubble. I also noticed that the floors looked to clean and that there was too little debris there. Thank gods it is BBQ season right now so I took some coal dust from the bottom of a bag of coals, smashed up a small piece of charcoal to get some larger pieces of debris and files that over the floor and debris to enhance the looks. And I feel it worked. If you want to try this yourselves, please make sure you are working outside or in a well ventilated room (the heat from the candle combined with the paint could cause fumes) and that you have something on hand to extinguish the fire should you overdo it. Also, sealing it all with varnish afterwards is a must otherwise you will smear things and you and other players might get dirty using the buildings.

Razed russian house

Razed russian house

Razed russian house