Burned-out peasant cottage finished

As the title says, I think I’m done.

Another WIP shot of the hovel

Got a little behind with mostly real-life problems, but here is the interior of Anda’s burned down and overgrown farm house.

WIP

WIP

Fieldstone 6: the burned hovel

It’s been a long time since I posted something substantive.  I don’t like to burden my hobbyist audience with real life quasi-drama, but suffice to say that my plate has gotten just a bit more full over the past few weeks, and yes it has impacted my hobby time.  I’m still running my RPG on a regular basis, but the evening hobby time is a little pinched.

Anyways, onto other news.   As it turns out, I won the grand prize for the Andaville raffle, a good sized gift card for the Home Depot.  Since it isn’t a gaming-related prize, the field is wide open.  But for now, I’m doing Andadas a favor by throwing together one or two of the pieces for his town that either weren’t taken or were taken but not made.  Ergo, here’s a WIP shot of what I’m doing now, a burned-down peasant farmhouse.

 

WIP burned down farmhouse

I’ll probably have it done next week.  Stay tuned.

 

Ruined Fieldstone 5

I realized that I can’t keep coming up with names for all the different pieces for my ruined fieldstone set, so I’ve just decided to be really uninspired and number them.  In any case, here’s the fifth one I’ve built to date.

A little gaming terrain math facts

A four foot by four foot table has 2,304 square inches.

For gaming terrain to cover 25% of the table, that would mean you would need 576 square inches of terrain.

If your terrain pieces are six inches square (and most of mine are, because I’m curiously compulsive that way), you would need sixteen pieces of terrain to make up 25% of the table.

For ruined fieldstone terrain, I have four, and a fifth on the worktable.

I have dreams of being able to one day field a gaming table for a skirmish game, one that would have serious terrain to play around.  Doing simple math like this makes me realize how much really needs to go into something like this.  I’ve seen some tables for Mordheim (and similar games) that have just under-decorated, and tables like that heavily favor missile weapons as a result.  I want a table where Chaos Cultists and Sisters of Sigmar have a chance against Reiklanders or the like.

Anyways, I’ll hopefully have piece number five up by the end of the week.  Stay tuned.

Another Mordheim piece

A while back I made several different terrain pieces using Hirst Arts Fieldstone line of molds.  Yesterday my new Ruined Fieldstone mold came in, so I decided to break it in by making another piece.  Here’s the result:

A simple corner terrain piece

Nothing fancy, but also easy and functional.  I really did put this together in an evening without too much trouble.  So I’m back to thinking about maybe making a few more, stuff that if I needed to I could give up without too much trouble.  There’s terrain I love and are really attached to, but easy pieces like this I could sell on eBay without feeling bad about it.  And since I need to do a lot of casts for the Normandy farm house, I can cast and build these on the side.

Making the hobby work for you, not the other way around

I’ve had a little while to think about my eBay-based hobby fund and I’ve decided to play it a little conservatively.

I bought the Ruined Fieldstone Mold, which I have loved since I borrowed it from my friend Fibble.  I’m going to cast the bejeezus out of that thing once it arrives.

After that, I think I’m just going to wait.  My hobbies exist to give me something to do in the evenings instead of watching NCIS re-runs and to have a reason to gather with my friends two or three times a month.  Right now I’m painting a unit of Chaos Marauders for WHFB that came in the big lot and will be absorbed into my existing WHFB Chaos army.  I’m also still building Coyote’s Normandy Farm house, and will soon be working on some more ruined fieldstone terrain (naturally).  Plus I’m also selling off more of the lot, although I think I’ll soon be reaching the end of what is really worth anything.

In addition, weekends in October are looking a little full with a lot of one-off events that supercede my D&D game.  In fact I’ll be lucky to get a gaming session in this month, which sort of kills the impetus to rush out and get the DMG2.

So here’s my plan.  I’m not going to spend any of the hobby money for a while, but instead wait until the Chaos Marauders are done, which should be two weeks minimum.  At that point I can look at all the different oddball things that I have considered buying and either make a decision or wait some more.  I don’t doubt that I’ll roll through dozens of different options (Field of Glory, Wargames Factory’s Colonial British, etc.) but I really want to avoid the impulse purchases.  After all, at this point I’m pretty set for stuff to do.  Why spend money needlessly and subject myself to possible buyer’s regret?

More WIP of the Normandy farmhouse

When last you saw this project, I had measured, cut, taped, and assembled the foamcore walls for the Normandy farmhouse I’m building in 28mm scale for a friend’s Napoleonics and WW2 wargaming table.

Now, I’m adding brick to the outside using molds from Modellers Moulds and Accessories, also sometimes called Keebler Studios or A&K Molds.  The bricks come in sheets of a variety of sizes off the molds, and mold #6 will enable you to create pretty much whatever basic brick pattern you want.  I’ve also got #1, which is handy for covering large amounts of surface, but isn’t as effective here where I have so many narrow surfaces.

Side wall bricked over

Another side and farmhouse front

Hopefully you can see from the pictures how the bricks are being applied.  To make up for my own inaccuracies in cutting foamcore, I’ve had to do a little trimming of bricks here and there to make it as flush as possible.

The Normandy Farmhouse, part one

As I mentioned earlier, I am building a Normandy farm house that will do double-duty on a friend’s Napoleonic wargaming table and his World War II wargaming table.  Today I had the day off and made some serious headway on the project, and I thought I’d go into some detail about how I’m building this piece of terrain.

First, I’m building it primarily out of foamcore, which for the uninitiated is 3/16″ styroam sheets sandwiched in-between paper.  It’s too bad most places sell it at 3/16″ and not 1/4″, but thems are the breaks, as the say.  Anyways, I drew a 1:1 scale blueprint on graph paper first to figure out how large it would really work out to be, calculate things like floor thickness, etc. and then with my trusty metal ruler marked out the walls on the foamcore.

Walls drawn onto foamcore

As a small side note, my father used to be an old-school draftsman, a tradesman who drew blueprints for engineers with paper and pencil (CAD essentially ruined his career).  I think some of that rubbed off on me.

Cutting foamcore is a pain, no two ways about it.  You have to use a very sharp knife and regardless of how good a job you do measuring and cutting, it never really works out exactly right.  In any case, I cut out the walls and then used masking tape to cover the foam edges around the windows and the door.  This will give it a better appearance and protect it should I decide to use spray paint on it (the spray paint will dissolve the foam).

To glue foamcore I use a product called “Hold the Foam” which is sold in craft stores.  It’s formulated to adhere to the plastic foam better than white glue or Aileen’s.  It’s very thick so you’ll have to smear it around with your finger.  To hold the walls together while the glue dries I use straight pins nicked from my wife’s sewing box

Creating the joints

Here, you can see the first floor put together.

the ground floor of the farmhouse

Now here is where it gets a bit off the beaten path for me.  Recently I acquired two molds from A&K Studios, both part of the “tiny brick” line.  Both “A” and “K” are friends of mine, and I wanted to see how the molds worked.

The “tiny bricks” are actually 1/4″ by 1/8″ long, and actually appear to be “scale” for 28mm miniatures.  I know they include lots of them, but the single bricks don’t seem nearly as useful as the larger blocks of bricks.  They are also 1/8″ thick, which is thinner than a floor tile for Hirst Arts, so you have to be gentle removing them from the molds.  The molds themselves are of a more pliable silicone rubber than Hirst Arts, so I’m being a bit more gentle with them.

Tiny Brick molds 1 and 6

My plan is to cover the outside of the foamcore with sheets of the brick.  I can tell you now that the inaccuracies in cutting the foamcore are now become very, very apparent, and in the future I think I’ll save this technique for buildings that don’t have detailed interiors so I can just do fake windows rather than cutting real ones.

More to come.  Comments welcome.  If you by chance end up getting some A&K molds, tell them you heard about them here, okay?

What I am doing next

Sometimes, you just need the right spark to get something going.  In this case, it was my friend Tyler over at The General’s Tent.  He is starting playing WWII along with Napoleonics, and was wanting to put together terrain for his table.

Well, that’s right up my alley, so we talked and I’m going to build a Normandy farmhouse in 28mm scale.  Today I did some research on the relevant architectural styles.  Normandy farmhouses are built using the “golden ratio” which is 1.6, meaning that a farmhouse that is 10″ on wide would be 6.25″ deep.  After making a paper diagram of that, I realized that it would be really large, so I went with 8″ instead.  That works out to be exactly 5″ deep, which is much easier to manage from a construction standpoint.

My plan is to build foamcore walls and floors, then face the outside with bricks cast from Modellers Moulds and Accessories.  For the roof I’ll use Hirst Arts wood shingle mold.  The final piece will have two stories with an accessible interior.

What do I like about this, aside from the fact that I won’t have to house it?  It’s a new time period, and a new building style.  I like the challenge of making something look like the real original but still be viable for a gaming table since a scale would be three feet long.