Scrap Scenery

 I'm currently making buildings (tenements and cottages) and in-between sessions of waiting for things to dry out I've also been making bit and pieces from scrap. The photo on the right shows varying sized palettes made from matchsticks and coffee-stirrers. The latter I actually bought rather than having to collect them; they cost about £1.50 for 1000.  The matchsticks are from a bag  I bought many years ago from a hobby shop but I suspect they'll be about the same price.

The photograph to the left shows the matchsticks in their original form, then two glued together, then two sets of two glued together. These make the central supports for the palettes.
In the photograph above you can see the black plastic ones that came with the fork-lift (from Tesco's). I couldn't really decide which size I preferred so I made  several different sizes, there is after all no standard size for a pallette.
The matchstick bundles of four were glued to the stirrers on one side, left to dry, cut to size then the process was repeated for the other side, making the finished palette.  I haven't actually put any paint on them as yet but I will paint a few eventually; as it is they are perfectly usable in their current state.
The photograph on the right show a Foundry figure on a couple of palettes for scale purpose (he's barely visible in the first photo); the fork-lift seat shows what a close match for scale it is.

This photo shows five piles of "bricks" that I made in about an hour. They are merely four pieces of 5mm foamboard (from the windows of the tenements I'm making), glued together then scored into 1cm x 5mm x 5mm "bricks". - a huge size for actual bricks, but perfectly acceptable for my wargaming purposes. The colour of these appears to be very red, but they are meant to represent new bricks - they will be toned down and matt-varnished

All those scraps of  coffee-stirrers that I have an abundance of were also put to use to make this pile of planks. This was a very simple case of gluing the sticks in a rough stack. The inside  of the stack is actually hollow and would have shown the rounded ends of the sticks facing the insides. I'll probably put a paint wash over this (eventually) but it isn't at the top of my to-do list .The piece, whilst not completely finished, is sufficient to be used in its present state.  
The final photograph shows both of the above pieces for comparison purposes.

All of these pieces can easily be used together in a variety of situations, a builders yard, a demolition site or a building site for example; all of course proving that essential cover for our miniatures.

I'll take this opportunity to welcome my two newest followers Dave VanDam and Captain Richard, I hope that you find something here to interest you.

That's all for this week, thanks for taking the time to look and as always comments are both welcomed and appreciated.

Final Fade Out

Image from THW's site

The latest incarnation of Two Hour Wargames' "All Things Zombie" rules,  "Final Fade Out" is nearly upon us, with an expected release date of late September/October. The THW blog (http://2hourblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/atz-final-fade-out-daybreak-final-act.html) has featured examples of play using the new rules.  Colgar6's site (http://colgar6.blogspot.com/2012/09/atz-ffo-campaign-game-5-battle-of.html) also has a full (exciting) write up of a game from his own Zombie campaign using the new rules as for playtesting. Vampifan, whom I communicate with regularly is also a playtester for Final Fade Out, so I'm privileged to having his views on the rules from too.

Although nothing is cast in stone, following on from THW's "After the Horsemen" rules, which featured the addition of skills and a greater number of attributes, to make for a more role-play style of game, FFO promises to have much of the same.

The additional skills of "Savvy" and "People" as separate skills to the all-encompassing Reputation (Rep) are useful ideas although I can't foresee the "Savvy" skill being used that much when its novelty wears off after a few games.  Separate Shooting and Melee skills would to my mind have been of greater use. However, one of the greatest features of THW's rules is their adaptability to one's own needs. If you don't like a rule, just change it or ignore it, it won't have that much effect (if any) on the overall enjoyment of the game.

There appears to be a lot more detail put into the "bells and whistles" aspect of the game, which I personally like.  Attention to detail in rules, where appropriate and where it doesn't detract from the flow of the game is welcomed and can of course be ignored if it proves annoying or a nuisance.

There will be changes of course that may appear to be changes, for changes sake, such as being able to fight four opponents simultaneously instead of six. Again though, if the changes don't appeal to you then you can always revert to the original ATZ rules.

Will I be buying the new rules ? - Undoubtedly, although I can't see me using them without having a bit of a tinker with them to give me the game I want. I'll certainly be using separate Shooting and Melee skills for example. there's a reason why our Gold Medallist in the Men's Double Trap, Shooting event (Peter Wilson), didn't also win the fencing competitions !

That's it for this week, thanks for taking the time to look.
All comments are of course welcomed and appreciated.

White Flags and Rubble

Even though I've got "United States of the Dead" as my current read, I've actually finished that book and what I thought was the last (fifth) book "Dead Surge" in the series "White Flag of the Dead". The fifth book doesn't actually complete its story-line and ends on a bit of a cliff-hanger, so that there is a good chance that there is a sixth book to come.
As I've stated previously all of the book suffer from poor proof-reading a thing that I'm generally no too tolerant of, but as you can surmise from the fact that I've now read all five current books in the series and I'm looking forward to a possible sixth that it hasn't bothered me that much.
There have been a few times when I've winced at a typo ("lances" rather than "glances" threw me a little) but there is a cracking story that more than makes up for them.
As I've said in previous blogs the general overall story follows the concepts in Sean T Page's book "War Against the Walking Dead".  Books one and two deal primarily with survivors trying to re-establish some form of normality after what they term "The Upheaval".
There are of course a lot of formulaic situations within the series, but book 3 (America the Dead) and book 4 (United States of the Dead) follow the same story-line which to be truthful is a bit contrived, but nevertheless is still entertaining.
Throughout the series the Zombies (they're always referred to as such) do change and develop, but they do so very slowly and more or less in what has become an accepted formula.

The "White Flag" of the series refers to the instruction to leave a white cloth from a window or on a mailbox to indicate to the authorities that someone in the household has become infected - a nice idea I thought and one that could well be used.

As a by-product to my Urban Road building I was left with long strips of cork tile  4mm-5mm wide and 304mm long. On a whim I decided to try and make some rubble with them.

The result of my efforts can be seen in the photograph to the right, although the "red-ness" of the bricks appears far brighter in the picture than it does in reality.

The lengths of cork were cut into smaller bits, anywhere from 1cm to 5mm in length and put into a plastic yoghurt style pot. I added a basic acrylic red colour and stirred until I thought that the bricks were sufficiently covered. When they were all but dry, I next added a smaller amount of a darker red and again stirred, but this time the objective being to get some paint on most of the bricks, not to cover them completely.
This process was continued with brown and a touch of black. In-between the various colours, the bricks would be separated roughly by hand as the drying paint tends to act like a glue too. This of course resulted in some of the cork breaking (which added to the textures and colours) and  there were some pieces stuck together, which were left.
As a final touch a very small amount of powdered filler was added to the mix, which again added to the colouring of the bricks.

The final photograph give some idea of the scale of the pile of rubble that I've made, the figure being a foundry workman.

I'm currently trying to mass-produce buildings for my campaign and I'll be needing some ruins as well as complete buildings no doubt. The rubble will add some easy detailing to any ruin I make and it could also be useful in a construction/demolition site as well as a stand-alone piece of cover for any bit of wasteland.  It took little to no effort to make and for a first-try I thought it came out pretty good, so much so that I'm considering making more.

Well, that's it for this week, thanks for taking the time to look; all comments are of course welcomed and appreciated.

Finally if I haven't already welcomed you, then "Welcome" (that's you "the DM's Revenge"), I hope you find something here to interest you.

Urban Terrain Boards - Part Two

Once all the terrain boards had the pavement pieces glued in place, a little filler was added to hide the transition from the road.
Next up was the painting of the various "sections" of the boards.
Basically there are three main parts to each board.
First, the road itself, a black base was used as I wanted a tarmac look and it gives a good definition between road and pavement.
Next, the pavement. I started with a general grey colour that was increasingly lightened.
Lastly was the expanse of what would make up the areas around buildings, alleyways backyards etc. This had to be a generic grey colour but I added a lot of browns along with the various dark grey shades.

This photograph on the left  shows the same boards as above but  from the opposite side of the table.

It is just possible to make out the various shades of colours used on the waste land parts of each  board.



Once I was happy with the general appearance of the various boards, the next stage was to paint in a centre line on each road.
To assist my somewhat shaky hands I used masking tape about 5mm apart for the centre line and the width of the masking tape as the gap between the lines. 
This left a nice gap of about 25mm between each line.
 The final masking tape effect was rather like a ladder.
Rather than actually painting the lines I used a sort of stipple approach with a fairly stiff brush.

The ladder effect of the masking tape can more easily be seen from the photograph to the left.

The test piece used in the above photograph can also be seen in the top-right of the photo.

The masking tape has been removed to reveal a straight dotted centre line which wasn't too bad in my opinion and at the very least suitable for wargaming on, even if not to exhibition or demonstration standards. 

This photograph shows the masking I used at each junction where the pedestrian crossings will be.
I've seen various designs of these and decided to go with the diagonal striped variety.
These are enclosed within two broad stripes, which alone would have been adequate as markers for the crossings.
The three pieces of masking tape that are joining the pavements at right angles provide the enclosing border lines of the crossings.

Here are two photographs that show the crossing lines and centre lines once they had been painted and the masking tape had been removed.  Removing the masking tape did take a few bits of paint with it, but these were few in number and only took a couple of minutes to fix.
One thing I had learned from the practice piece was that painting the lines a pure white was a mistake. They looked far too pristine, so I darkened them a little  as I went along and although it won't show up in the photographs, it was well worth the trouble.

The next task was to paint the diagonals on the cross-walks, which I did using a 5mm stiff nylon "chisel" head brush.

I'm not the best in the world at keeping a steady hand whilst trying to paint a straight line, nor am I that good at keeping a uniform thickness, but with another brush ready to cover mistakes I eventually got to the stage where I was fairly happy with the overall results.

As far as finishing painting I was almost done, all I had left to do was paint the edges of each board a darkish grey to finish them off.

 Here's a couple of photographs of the same board layout, showing all seven completed boards, but from opposite "ends".

You can see that the curved road still has to have its centre line completed, but that is a minor task that will be done when I'm having a steady-hand day.
The roads also had various greys and browns added to them in both washes and highlights, so they didn't appear as a harsh black.

There were a few minor problems and hiccups that I encountered when  making these boards. First up was the problem of using two different sized cork tiles, one set I used was metric, at 300mm a side and the other older set I used was Imperial at 1ft a side (about 304mm) which  meant I had to trim about 4mm overlap from a lot of the boards. (There was an unexpected bonus because of this which I'll relate in a future blog.)
The next potential problem I encountered was in trying to purchase more tiles, my two local DIY stores, either didn't stock them (B&Q) or had them at 3.2mm thick (Wickes), As my current tiles are approximately 5mm thick these won't match up too well - so its back to the drawing board (or the interweb) for my next terrain boards. I have one to finish from the above "set" and two bigger boards planned, each 600mm x 1200mm.

The final photo shows  a mock-up of the layout with my meagre collection of buildings in situ.
If I was to attempt this project again I would widen the roads to 150mm, rather than the 100mm that they currently are and I'd also plan to have all the materials I needed before I started out, probably with a few extra bits too.
Before anyone asks, I've no intention of adding  street-lamps, traffic lights, or anything else of that ilk.  The main reason being one of practicality, tall slender things tend to get knocked over if not affixed and broken if they are.   In addition, this is a wargaming set-up; it's not meant to have details to the n'th degree like a model railway layout.  If features don't add anything to the game (for example - cover) then I think its hardly worth the extra trouble of modelling them. I will however be adding the usual street furniture that one might expect, skips, garbage cans etc.

That's it for my Mark 1 Urban Terrain Boards, all comments are of course welcomed and appreciated.

If anyone is lurking out there whom I haven't already said "Hi" to then "Hi" I hope you find something here you like.

Urban Terrain Boards - Part One

This was my first venture into making terrain boards for myself and I took my time planning it.
The first criteria was that the boards had to fit on my table top of 8' x 4' (approx 2440mm x 1220mm), with no overlap. The second criteria was that all the boards had to tessellate to enable varying board layouts.

Terrain board and tiles

6mm MDF was chosen for the bases of the individual boards and these were to be overlaid using 300mm x 5mm cork tiles. Both cork and  MDF are fairly easily cut using sharp craft knives.
The sheets of  MDF come in are the same size of the base board that I have and were able to be cut to a standard 600 x 600mm square.
The cork tiles come in 300mm squares in a pack of 9 tiles. The decision to use cork tiles was made a lot easier by the fact that I already had several !

Overlays

The tiles were either going to be used whole or in 50mm wide strips (for pavements), 150mm squares or half tiles (150mm x 300mm).

I had determined early on that I wouldn't have roads running down the middle of the terrain boards as I'd found this very restrictive when making river terrain, although these being roads suitable for the USA it may not have been that important.  The photograph to the left shows the various basic pieces. The short strips were off-cuts from another project  of many years ago.

The photograph to the right shows the basic idea for format of the boards.

This black are is  here the actual roads will be and the raised areas are the cork pavements etc.

This board is a basic T-junction and uses 1 whole tile, 2 half tiles, 3 300mm x 50mm strips and a 150mm x 50mm strip.

All in all then this particular board would use the best part of 3 whole tiles.

These two photographs show  of all the boards with their tile overlays in place.

Having determined which bits went with which boards and in which orientation (taking advantage of the manufactured straight edges wherever possible) I then beveled off all the edges of the pavements.

This in itself was a tedious boring task, b ut one I felt that had to be done.
In the top-right of the photograph you may be able to make out my rough working-outs  of the eight boards.

This next photograph shows the same layout as above with all the cork overlays glued into position.

From this photograph you can see that I also needed some 50mm x 50mm squares for some corners of various boards. This was pre-planned and they came from the smaller off-cuts that I had around.
It should also be noted that I'm one board short of my original eight. This came about because I wanted to make a curving 90 deg. bend rather than  a standard right angled one, and I was one cork tile short !

These  next four photographs are all of the same board configuration.

The coloured board, whilst it may look a bit blue, is in fact a fairly dark grey (I'm going to sack that cameraman one of these days).

The blue/grey board was an experiment  to see if a spray tin would suffice to colour in the board.
It took far too long and too much spray, so that idea was abandoned.

Filler was used on the pavement for additional texture and to seal the join between pavement and road.

Just another week

Another week and my enthusiasm has once again been lifted thanks mainly to the encouragement of others in the zombie community.
This week I finished off the novel "White Flag of the Dead" and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The book is not going to win any prizes for literature nor is the story particularly groundbreaking but it is a very easy read.  The story itself follows a central character through the outbreak and his building up of a community around him and reminds me very much of Sean T. Pages "War Against the Walking Dead",
The writer uses little in the way of what I'd call "fluff"; he sticks to the action and what could be considered the more interesting stuff, so time can pass quite quickly if for example there are days when all that would happen is a repeat of say foraging for supplies then this may well only merit a single line - which I quite like.
The book does suffer slightly from poor proof-reading but unlike some other novels I've read it doesn't seem to detract from either the story or the pace of the book.  This is one of those books that you'd label a page turner or "Just one more chapter then I'll turn in for the night" type of books.
I've enjoyed the read so much that as soon as I'd finished it I'd bought and started the second in the series "Taking it Back" and I'm now about half-way through that one too ! There are at least five books in the series of "White Flag of the Dead" and as long as the standard of these first two is continued I'll end up reading them all.
(The first book cost me less than £2 and I believe all the others are under £4 from Amazon Kindle)

 Following on from last week's post here's another look at the figures I featured as a group.
They are of course all Wargames Foundry figures, with the three photographs being split into roughly civilians, suits and survivors for no real reason.
I'm still considering what to do with my basing and whether or not to flock them (I'm experimenting with various flock techniques at the moment, including making my own, but I'm still undecided.

 

The photographs of course are still up to my usual standard of naff, but keeping them small and a little out of focus means less errors in painting can be seen (Zabadak's photography hint #23)

I'm well on my way to getting my urban terrain boards to the point where they're usable. I'm currently concentrating on centre road-markings and junction markings using masking tape as an aid.

Next week's blog should feature the making of my urban terrain boards, from start to finish.

That's all for this week, thanks all for taking the time to look and  of course if you feel like commenting, feel free to do so; all comments are welcomed and appreciated.

Ramblings (2)

No great accomplishments this weeks this week but I have had time to reflect on the fact that it's been just over a year since I was taken into hospital and and whilst there, I started on this Zombie project.  My thoughts at the time were very jumbled (drugs) but I knew that a totally new venture would take a long time to get underway.  I think that at the time I said it would take about a year and that I would be in full swing by Xmas 2012. Over the last year I have had many, many nice surprises and made very many friends in the Zombie Wargaming Community, all of whom have been encouraging and helpful.
At the time, starting a new project from scratch was a daunting task but bit by bit I've made steady progress, so much so that I even managed my first practise game, using the All Things Zombie rules but without the zombies !  I had two friends actually playing the game whilst I tried to keep them to the rules.  It worked well, with only a few minor problems, no photographs were taken (to protect the innocent), but we're already planning our next game - with Zombies !

Efforts to advance my Zombie project over the last week has mainly been concentrated on further work on my urban terrain boards, however continued problems with my back haven't helped the cause. I'll be writing up a complete blog about the boards when they're nearer completion.
The photograph to the right shows the initial stages in the making of the terrain boards, but due to the cameraman's myopia doesn't really show that much.
The bases board (the large sheet of MDF with the bar-code showing in the bottom right hand corner)
measures 8ft x 4ft (2400mm x 1200mm) and one of the boards that will go on top can just be made out on the left hand side of the photo.
To fill the streets with rush hour traffic even more another trip to Poundland/World garnered me four more SUV type civilian vehicles.  I had thought that a quick going over in Acetone would remove the transfers (decals), but I soon discovered that they were actually a part of the overall paintwork.
They have the same garish silver interior as the last set of Military style Humvees/SUV's and are basically the same design, lacking the pull-back and let go motors.
They'll all be getting their windows blanked out and will all end up with a new paint job.

I've also been plodding away at some  of my Wargames Foundry figures and have managed to finish off these nine.

They're the usual mix of suits, survivors and civilians most of whom will be in most people's collections no doubt.
As you've probably gathered, I'm pretty much bored painting figures and really need to turn my attentions to making some building to fill my Urban Terrain as well as reading rules, planning my campaign, getting a few practice games in, reading blogs, commenting on blogs, reading forums, watching for new figure releases etc. etc. etc.

There just isn't enough time in the week !

That's it though for this week and as always, all comments are welcomed and appreciated.

I don't think I've gained any followers in the last week or so, but if you're lurking out there, "Welcome to my blog", I hope you find something to amuse or interest you.