Trench Warfare - part 1.

 

As I continue to drag myself forcibly out of the hobby funk I've been in for the previous could of months, I decided to make a start on some scratch-built terrain.

I've always watched terrain crafting videos on YouTube, and used to make various terrain projects with my late father. Granted these were for railway modelling, not Wargaming, but the basic skills* are all the same.

When I was building the table, I took the opportunity to rip some various size terrain bases from an extra sheet of 6mm MDF I had previously purchased.

Hills, Woods, Building bases and two sets of four foot long trench systems were planned out and ripped from the sheet. The edges being beveled to an angle with an electric sander**.

Cutting ahead in the photos here, I have already glued down the polystyrene which will form the scree of the trench, where the dirt has been thrown to create cover.

Craters were also dug into this at several points down the line.

I wasn't happy with the height of the trench compared to a model (these are game pieces after all not diorama's) and I wanted a little extra detail at the back, so I took some 5mm foamcore and added a small hollow all the way down the length of the trench. The idea is that the duckboards will be damaged or missing in places and this will give me a good way to add some limited water effects and variation to the flooring.

And the obligatory destroyed section from a direct hit.

As in the previous Crater build, it was on with the aluminium tin foil to smooth out the land forms.

And parts 1 and 2 together to see how they line up.

Then as per the previous build, it was on with the forbidden battery, of interior filler, PVA, brown paint and water mix to get a basic covering of the land down and to smooth out some areas.

Once this was dry, I did a second coat of it in. Few places, then covered the entire piece in OVA and builders sand before grabbing whatever nearly empty can of spray paint I could find (in this case Flames of War British Desert) and using that to lock in the sand layer.

I'm not entirely happy with the joins between sections,  it I can live with it, as once again, these are gaming pieces, they're going to get knocked about being out into storage and taken out for the games like.

At this point I decided to check what it was actually looking like with a few models.

I was quite happy with that, so turned my attention to the next step...

Duckboards, the wooden floorboards which stopped soldiers standing in water and mud for months on end and suffering from trenchfoot.

Not a job I was looking forward to but an essential one.

First step was to gather supplies, taking my son to our local McDonald's garnered these coffee stirrers which would be extremely useful...and cheap!

Then it was just on with the job of cutting them to length in bulk. A good podcast or film in the background helps with this immensely.

Once this was ready, with no other choice, it was down with the PVA and on with the boarding. Time consuming, but worth it.

I initially started off with water down PVA but it wasn't sticking. So I switched to neat PVA and once it had started to grab and I had the flooring done, I slapped a couple of coats of watered down PVA over the entire thing.

The same process was used with the wooded revetment (vertical) boarding which holds up the wall of the trench.

For supports I turned to a bag of BBQ skewers I had picked up at the end of the summer when everything was reduced in the supermarkets.

With some cheap superglue these were glued to every joint of the revetment boards and left to dry, leaving me with this.

The entire piece was then given another two or three coats of watered down PVA to seal and secure everything in place.

I'm working on the second section of trench and am aiming to get all four feet of this side done before I start painting it so it will match along the full length.

I'm going to go back in with some filler/paint mixture and add some built up dirt around the joins between the floor and wall, and maybe add a few crates and supplies up and down the length.

Nothing overtly period specific or 40k specific, as I have been eyeing up the Wargames Atlantic WW1 range which looks awesome and their STL additions are brilliant. So these trenches will remain generic in order to be used for multiple periods.

I'll post an update with the second part once it's at this stage.

Until next time, have nice day...

*Sadly, with the rise of plastic and pre-built terrain over the past years, these scratch-building skills seem to be dying out amongst hobbyists.

**I did so many in one go that I was joking that I would give myself vibration white finger (a disease caused by using vibrating power tools for extended periods of time over and over again, ex-miners suffer a lot with it. My father got a claim in the late 90s/early 00s when the UK government was paying out for it.

Legions Imperialis Cathedral.

 

Terrain is a massive part of not just the rules of a game, but also immersion and making a board look good.

To that end my friend Duncan, jumped on a Kickstarter for a load of urban Legions Imperialis terrain STLs to 3D print.

The collection includes a bunch of 4 inch wide terrain tiles to make a road network, a LOT of modular parts to stack to make buildings with, a set of canals and stairs/bridges.

All in all a shit load of stuff...

There are also some pre-built/supported buildings ready to print whole. 

This particular piece is one of those, and only just fit on the build plate of the Lego Saturn we were using to print with.

To start with, rather then the usual grey granite colour you normally see for urban terrain, I decided I wanted a warmer, brownstone/sandstone colour, which matches a lot of the Churches/Minsters/Cathedrals here in the UK. I began with a spray undercoat of Zandri Dust.

There is so much detail on this print, it's hard to believe that we made it at home.

So it was onto the masses of windows and supports. To give some variation, I decided to paint the large arch windows in Leadbelcher and then do the higher smaller windows with Retributor Armour for some gold gilding and to denote the richness of the church*.

At this point I wanted a different colour for the roof and having been flicking through an old "how to build terrain" blog, found a building with a darker blue roof.

Deciding to shamelessly** copy this, I went in and tidied up the roof with Zandri Dust from the pot, and then gave it a coat of Akhelian Green (which comes out in a dark turquoise colour) which is a colou: I really like.

The finials along the top were then touched up with Retributor Armour, just to give a little more baroqueness to the model.

Next, to tie the model together and make it look a bit better, I have then entire model a couple of successive drybrushes, first of Baneblade Brown and secondly, very lightly, with Flayed One Flesh.

Finally, after a discussion about the windows, I was going to leave them, Duncan suggested painting them with contrast Black Templar.

I'm glad I took the chance on his suggested, time consuming as it was, because the finished model looks so much better.

I've placed the building on a few of those terrain plates Duncan had printed previously, and a couple of his Legions Imperialis Malcador tanks for scale.

This was a nice diversion, and after visiting Fraser the other day, I returned home with his entire LI collection to build up (he has a problem with his "to-built" pile, it keeps growing).

So I am thinking of buying a bottle of resin and printing off a collection of terrain for my own games of Legions Imperialis with Fraser in the future.

Speaking of the modular nature of a lot of the STLs, I wonder if we could make an LI scale facsimile of Cologne Cathedral?

That won't be for a while though, other projects await...

Until next time, have nice day...

*Yes, I know Legions Imperialis is set in the Horus Heresy when the Imperial Church wasn't a thing, the Emperor having tried to stamp religion out for a secular scientific truth. 

But what else is this building of not a Cathedral?

Maybe it's a hold over from the previous civilization before the Imperium took over, or a former religious building turned over to the administratum for office space?

Whatever it is, it looks good.

**Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Dreadtober 2024 - Dreadline missed.

 

So, Dreadtober has been failed this year.

This is as far as I managed to get with the Meka-Dread painting, real life just caught up with everything.

All the parts have most of their basecoat's down, I just need to add some brass detailing to the bolt heads on the legs and then I can wash everything with the brown weathering shade and then work colours up from there.

I'll get it finished soonish, but I'm just waiting for some good chunks of hobby time as work has ramped up with contracts, so my time is starved at the minute as I'm getting home and spending a couple of hours with the family in the evenings rather then just hobbying immediately when I get home.

I managed to work up the craters, as they were a quick project to finish which kept me in hobby, but anything bigger which requires more time was just not going to work for me.

Real life, always getting in the way...

Until next time, have nice day.

Cratered wasteland -terrain build.

 

Terrain.

It's one of the most vital things to make an immersive wargame, but often one of the most overlooked elements of the tabletop, often it is either nonexistent, cardboard flats or just thrown up at the last moment. 

With the gaming table having been christened with it's first game, but some of the terrain unpainted, I really wanted to rectify that aspect, and wrote out a couple of lists of terrain I would like to build.

One set of terrain I would like to tackle is a set of opposing trenches and cratered no-mans land in-between. I know my board is only three foot across, but I can position to have between eighteen and twenty inches of no-mans land easily. Historically, frontline trenches were uncomfortably close at times from looking at aerial photographs of World War One (the brilliant Wargames Atlantic kits are something I would like to look at in future and this terrain set is my justification for them!).

Rather then start with the trenches, and only having a few free hours causing me to miss the deadline for Dreadtober, I began with a small set of three craters on scatter bases so I could do a little each day and then leave to dry.

The bases were first cut from some good 5mm MDF I had left over from a previous project, no warping here due to glues and paints.

Then a broken sheet of polystyrene insulation was purchased from the DIY shop for a bargain and I set about it with a knife to make the rough crater shapes in the photo:

Bit of a mess was made though...

A closer look at one of the craters at this stage. I wrote on the base the rough size of the flat space I wanted "50mm" in this case. These being ordered to provide surface area for bases to be placed securely, as I really wanted to avoid "wobbly model syndrome".

Out came the crafting supplies next, and I chose to try a technique from Eric's Hobby Workshop on YouTube. He uses aluminium foil to shape the edges and piles of dirt for his build.

Unlike Eric with his Hot Glue Gun, I used PVA and had to wait for it to dry before moving on.

The next day, fully dry, it was out with the next set of crafting materials, and a batch of filler/PVA/some old brown paint I had was made up and applied liberally over the pieces:

As such, the brown was far too light in shade for my liking, but it worked as a base layer:

And a few rest Kriegers to demonstrate model positioning:

The next step was to start texturing, and builders sand was glued down across the entire set of craters:

These were then sprayed with my last can of Mournfang Brown,vans generously drenched in my homemade brown was, like I use on my tanks:

And the drybrushing layers bagan, first with Baneblade Brown, then with Ushabti Bone:

Before the Ushabti Bone layer, a few bits were picked out in Mechanicus Standard Grey, to represent stones and rocks churned up:

Next was a couple of successive drybrushes, first with Abaddon Black, then Corvus Black both in the main recess of the crater to represent scorching from the explosion. Finally an all over light drybrush of Flayed One Flesh mixed with Ulthuan Grey was given, just to draw out the very highest of textures, the light Fleshtone gives a less harsh final appearance then just pure Ulthuan Grey, which is a near white colour:

And a final "action" shot, with a few of my Imperial Fists traversing the cratered hellscape with the mountains behind:

I do have a light tan fleece blanket to use as a base cloth for the table and these pieces will sit on that and blend well with the colours used.

I want to add the two trench lines to the set, as well as a couple of blown out hills, one covered in craters, the other will have a burned out wood on it, as well as a few loose scatter sections of burned out woods.

I am considering a ruined building, maybe a church, as a centerpiece between the lines, think the Village of Velfwhich they assault in the Wonder Womanmovie set during World War One, or the atmospheric town scenes in 1917.

All in all I think these three craters took me about four hours (minus drying times), done in little half hour stints in my free time each day.

Whilst I wasn't planning on it, the end of October became very busy with a rush of extra trains at work meaning I was called in on my days off and taking the Mrs out for her birthday last weekend as well, far more important, ate into my already stretched hobby time. Things should calm down through November as I have some annual leave coming up at work, so I'm going to try to set aside some dedicated hobby time to get stuff done.

Not sure what to start next, but terrain is definitely on the cards for the time being.

Until next time, have nice day...

October Motivational.

Until next time, have nice day...

Dreadtober 2024 - Torso work.

 

The madness of Dreadtober 2024 continues, and I started work on the main Torso of the Meka-Dread this past week.

I didn't get any photos of the original colours going on (no point really), but here is the torso alongside one of the Kills Kanz I finished in Dreadtober 2022.

I've stuck to the same overall palette of red, black and white, with a little gold thrown in for a spot metallic.

The rust is still really bright, but you can see the various components better now that there are some other colours present to break up the outline a bit.

The "Face" was stippled with white for the skull, it won't be getting checkers, however the various other white panels definitely will.

I'm also torn between doing the massive eye in a bright yellow or a green glow.

Next it was time to start weathering, Orks never clean their vehicles after all.

So a home ade wash was mixed up, ten parts Rhinox Hide, fifteen parts water, two drops of Washing Up liquid. This last is to break the surface tension of the water and force it to flow around all the details on the model.

I'm using a spare upturned cavalry base to mix in, after a friend nicked (by acciddnt I'm sure) my previous mixing tub after I showed him how to make his own wash for his terrain...

Half hour later, she was dry.

The Rhinox Hide is a little more reddish then brown when it separated out like this, which aids in the dirty/rusty effect, the texture on the skull face itself is really nice.

You can see how it settles into details like the grills at the bottom of the engine area or the tubings on the torso front. 

You can also see the difference in brightness of the rust here in this photo.

Whilst still somewhat prominent on the torso, it's definitely more subtle then before, like on the gun.

Finally I thought I'd end this update with a photo of the current state of play of the dread, you can rally see the difference the was makes when compares with the other subassemblies.

I'm hoping to get some work done on the beast this week, but that depends on both work and my health.

One of the reasons I feel like I am behind schedule is because I have been ill this last week (last Saturday I didn't even get out of bed all day), so I'm hoping it starts to clear up and I can stop having coughing fits* so I can paint normally again.

Next steps are to block in the details on the torso leaving the weathered colours beneath, and to start with the rest of the parts.

It's just this is the start of the time consuming part of painting with picking out panels and details, etc. 

Then CHECKERS!!!!!!!!!

I advise anyone reading to check out the Dreadtober blog here:- Dreadtober as there are some cracking entries being worked upon.

So, Until next time, have nice day...

*Fortunately it's not, whatever variant of COVID is doing the rounds in the UK. It just seems like a bad chest infection/dry insistent coughing.