Windmills on my Mind Part 2 - Painting and Glee

Hi folks, remember this: Windmills... Part 1? Don't blame you, it was back in October, granted, the very last day of October but still, that was a long time back. To be honest, it's been a dry spell for hobby for me. It's actually been two full months since a painted model rocked up on this blog. Just one of those things. But now, I have a biggie to start 2015 with:

Bring on Quixote! The windmill is complete. I waxed rhapsodic about this last time so I'll try to keep my hyperbole to a safe minimum but whoa. The quality of the work Tabletop World put into their sculpting just leaps out when you spend hours painting the thing. Best of all, like all the best models, it started to tell me a story through the little details. It's starting to look tatty, the shingles are starting to break (bad when you want nice dry flour). It clearly isn't being well maintained. The story that rolls in my mind is that the miller is currently in military service (there's a war on after all) and his wife and - what the heck, lets add a child - daughter are keeping the mill working in his absence. The ladies are going to have to get brave and fix that roof and sails soon or there won't be much of a mill left.

I tried to take some step by step shots of the stonework as I went but ohdeargod did the camera hate me. It just looked grey in every step. So I'll just talk you through it. Skavenblight Dinge covers the entire thing in a nice stoney basecoat. Technically you could just start highlighting there and then but to make it look better we need to force some tonal variation into the grey. Tonal variation is totally going to be the words of the day for this post, if it was a video I'd keep a little counter on screen with a "ping" every time I said it. So anyway, tonal variation (ping): I got out of my paint boxes every single vaguely grey, beige, grey-brown, greyish green, greyish blue, all of them. Each got mixed with Skavenblight Dinge and then painted over a stone. I'd wager each colour only appears on about a dozen stones on the whole windmill. Tiny variations but enough to give that natural variety. Then a pair of highlights, first with Administratum Grey then Longbeard Grey put a common theme all the way through the stonework while defining the texture. Stonework is fairly easy but time consuming.

Woodwork went a slightly different path. I then sloshed Badab Black over the German Camo Black-Brown basecoat to define the shadows. Three highlights followed, all drybrushed, first German Camo Black-Brown again, then two highlights of German Camo Black-Brown mixed with Administratum Grey (2:1 then 1:2). Old wood isn't very brown, it's more grey-ish. Tonal variation (ping) was added by using thin glazes of other browns to make the planks individual. Into the recesses of the shingles (deliberately left the planks underneath the shingles free of green) I added several layers of green enamel weathering paints in order to make a mossy vibe to the recesses. Unfortunately as they are beautifully translucent the camera ignores them. Grrr. The metalwork is just AP Gunmetal mixed with black, washed black and a thin glaze of Ammo Rust Streaks.

The windows are Val Dark Sea Blue, washed with black and gloss varnished. The window leads are then painted the same dark metal as the roof but without the rust streaks as lead doesn't rust like that. A nice by product of washing the leading was matt areas around the leading looking like muck building up.

Around the base of the tower I needed to get some muck and dirt that the wind, rain, passing cows etc have stained the stonework with. For this, I again turned to enamel weathering paints. Streaking Grime, Winter Streaking Grime and Dark Streaking for Green Vehicles (essentially, muddy brown, muddy green and a stronger slime green) were variously heavily stippled around the base of the tower. Odourless thinner was used to soften the intensity and fade out the colours before a second round of green was applied to the lowest stones. It looks good in the photos but so much better in person. Superb stuff. Technically the colours I was using were AK Interactive bought a while ago, these days I prefer to buy from Ammo of Mig Jimenez because reasons. Now I've rabbited on about these paints a lot over the last few years. They've completely replaced pigments in my work because they don't rub off, can be removed if you make a mistake and do almost everything pigments can do. Heck, if you add some plaster of paris they can do everything pigments can do. Pigments are great for dioramas and display models. They can't be beaten for conveying the physical presence of dust and rust etc. But dioramas are not touched. Wargaming models are, a lot. So for that reason, enamels is now my go-to weathering product. For as long as I've rabbited on about these things I've said "I must get a tutorial or something worked out". Well here it is, sorta:

Left to right: Dots and streaks applied, first "stumping", second "stumping" see below

The sails are another of those jaw-dropping Tabletop World creations, it would have been easier and more cost efficient to produce one sail and cast four for each windmill. Tabletop World instead made each one unique. It really helps the overall look of the mill and I applaud craftsmen taking decisions to make a quality product rather than just to increase the profitability of a product. After doing the woodwork and attendant metal banding (so, so many bands, twitch), it was time to look at the sails. A mixture of Val Stone Grey and Deck Tan makes a lovely canvas tone but isn't terribly good at coverage so three thin basecoats later I had the main colour. Highlighting simply careful drybrushing of a lighter (more Deck Tan) version of the same mix and then pure deck tan focussing on where the gorgeously thin sails tent over the wooden frame. The ropes were picked out in a more yellowish tone (sorry, didn't write down which) and then shaded with enamel Streaking Grime. I used the enamels as I knew what was coming next.

Lining up nigh on all the enamel weathering paints I had (except for rust and slimy green) I started putting dots and streaks along the length of the sail (leftmost picture above). This will look awful but trust the pirate viking. Give it a few minutes or so to dry off a little (enamel paints can take anything up to a day to cure, it's one of many reasons why they're useless for painting the main body of the model) and then we start "stumping". Stumping is when we take a clean brush, damped down with odourless turpentine or the more aggressive white spirit, and smear and fade the marks we made in stage one. Think about the direction the rain and other factors will move the muck in. The result was the middle photo, more subtle, but still a bit too "painted" for my tastes. A second stumping resulted in beautiful, subtle, washed-out, difficult to photograph muck. Brilliant. Mig has a bunch of tutorials on his site that explain it much, much, much better but there you have it!

After fitting the sails (made much, much easier by the prep work done in part one) I couldn't resist throwing a realm of battle tile and some trees down and seeing how it looks. Pretty damn good I think! One day I might make a base for it to give a bit more story (sacks of grain, worn path leading to the door etc) but that does limit where I can place the mill during terrain deployment. We shall see. Tabletop world assure me that they are making more cottagey type buildings to go with the grand urban structures so the village will grow. Speaking of story, in game I was thinking of some rules to reflect the mill's more unique features. Usual rules for occupying buildings but the building gains flammable despite being stone as flour dust? That stuff is explosive:

Doesn't seem like there'd be enough dry dust to take out the building but having flaming weapons deal double wounds... that seems enough. All in all, a really fun project and I can't wait to get my hands on another building so the village can grow. Tabletop World, I applaud you.

Feel free to throw questions and comments at me below, until next time folks.

TTFN

Tree's Company

Wood yew beleaf it? Ash soon as one scenery article a-pears another follows. Sorry, I'll stop, no more puns, completely stumped... sorry. Yes, today's article is all about trees, and because it was a slow process I've taken step-by-step pics too.

For this round of trees I'm using the old GW "bottle brush" trees, they're the shape of chestnut trees by the way, that have been hanging around about as long as the game board awaiting the appointed hour.

First of all you need to separate the trees from whatever root system your trees come with. If they can't be separated then you'll just have to be careful. These were just wire hot glued in to the roots, so a quick twist did it. Put the bottle brushes to one side and concentrate on the roots. Glue the roots on a base roughly the width of your trees. Handily, the 60mm flat round plastic bases citadel made were perfect. I had a bunch of them so that made it easy. In the absence of those I would recommend one of the companies making mdf bases. Sarissa Precision are a good bet. Texture them as normal and then prime - I'd recommend black.

There are some that would say this is enough trees. There are Forty here. Those people are wrong as we shall see later.

Painting begins in exactly the same way as the table, with the same colours (Calthan Brown and Tausept Ochre from the painting kit, Terminatus Stone to finish) so as to help blend the bases to the existing soil.

The colour of the trees never resolved well on the camera. Trees aren't brown y'see? They're a brownish grey. A good analogue for this is a basecoat of Val German Camo Black-Brown. Drybrushed with a mix of Val GCBB and Baneblade Brown and a final light drybrush of Administratum Grey. In real life they look browney-grey. On camera? They look primed. Grump.

Next we need to get some foliage going. This will blend the edge of the base in to the grass of the table (damn near perfectly if you check the first picture again). Just put a rough ring of neat PVA around the edge of the base and then give it a good, pressed-down coat of the same static grass mix you made the table with. It's worth making a load of the grass mix when you do the table so that you can blend all future scenery projects. This will give you a "Mongol Furry Hat" look which will look a little unnatural at this stage but remember two things. One, we ain't done yet, two, grass doesn't grow too densely under trees that are packed together in a wood. In a park? Sure, a wood, no.

What you do get a whole stack of is leaf-mold. Antenoceti's Workshop's Leaf Litter is a great analogue for this. I believe they're some sort of seed pods but they are so cheap and numerous in the pot (I used less than a third of the pot doing the entire 40 trees) that it's worth buying them. Thinned PVA brushed on lightly and then a layer of leaves sticks a thin coating of them. Sadly, they're not terribly durable this way so we break out the secret weapon. Watered down PVA.

Before we coat the whole thing in watered down PVA I'll share a tip with you. It's terribly easy to glue your carefully modelled bases to the table. To avoid this? Just stick a coin under the base. A 2p piece is perfect. Just enough gap (compare the two bases the arrow is connecting in the picture above) to prevent sticking and very stable.

Hoo boy, this next step takes some time when you are batch painting forty of the damn things. A thinned mix of PVA - about 1 part PVA to 3 parts water - is heavily brushed over the grass, leaves, everything. This will weld all the scatter materials down. At this stage I also glued a few weed tufts to about 10 of the bases just to add some more life.

When it's all dry you get quite a nice convincing leaf litter. You can now glue your trees back into the trunks and admire your handiwork!

See? Forty trees, barely covers 2/3 of a 2'x2' Realm of Battle tile. Sheesh. Clearly need more tree... especially some different species to mix up the appearance a bit. I'm also going to make some bases of undergrowth, ferns, bushes etc. to mix up amongst the trees to improve the woodland look.

Well, having either given you ideas or taught you to suck eggs I shall away to play with my wood... ahem.

TTFN

Fields of Glory

This is a short update, but one that I am very, very excited about.

Yeah baby! Mulder house totally has a gaming table! I've got a whacking great 6'x4' slab of MDF and some saw-horses to stand it on for the living room. For photography though, a nice bright October day was better so please ignore all the 1:1 scale foliage in the background (weeds mostly).

As this was the - I'm guessing - 6th or 7th of these I've painted/helped paint (used to work for GW back in the day) I'd had a bit of experience with these. The Realm of Battle is an expensive but awesomely convenient table system. The bag it comes in keeps it tidy and the hill is a lovely design that allows a bunch of configurations. Even matches perfectly with the old 4-part hill - now sadly and bafflingly out of production. From previous ones I'd painted I knew I'd want to erase the skull pits. They look kinda ridiculous (at least add other bones if you want a charnel pit) and take a long time to paint for not a great final effect. We fixed them by using polyfilla smeared in to the pits and then rough sculpted to match the cracked ground their found in. Looks muuuch nicer. On to the painting!

I had the old painting kit that went with the board (yep, it's been hanging around my house a loooong time) so after a quick primer coat, I say quick, a can and a half of primer, I had a big bottle of Calthan Brown to basecoat it with. I can let you in on a trade secret here. Don't prat about with brushes. Get a small paint roller (about 4") and use it to basecoat the whole thing. You'll have it done with no brush streaks in a matter of minutes. Once this has dried - and I really mean dried - you can drybrush on the texture. For me the colours were first, the slightly smaller tub of Tausept Ochre followed by Tausept mixed with a little Val Deck Tan. This gave me the earth tones. It's worth noting that the Realm of Battle boards work great just painted. You don't need the static grass and they look ace as desert boards.

the tufts on the left are much, much lighter in tone than they appear here

Next came rocks. My method started from Skavenblight Dinge, a decent stone colour in these dreary post-Charadon Granite days. A wash of Dinge, Calthan Brown and a bit of black helped bind it to the soil colour. This is important as soil is made of weathered, broken down rock and organic matter. The rocks need to have some of the soil colour in the mix. I drybrushed them up with a couple of increasingly light mixes of Dinge and Deck Tan (hey, notice the same colour used in the soil highlighting and the rock highlighting? Helps too). Finally I used a bunch of different enamel weathering paints (AK Interactive but because reasons I'd recommend Ammo instead as it's the same exact stuff) to put much, green streaks and pale lichen-ey bits all over the rocks. Using odourless turps you can fade out enamels really nicely and creates lovely natural effects.

[EDIT: oh yeah, totally forgot about the grass! Working one tile at a time: decent PVA is spread everywhere I wanted grass, fading out where I wanted the earth showing. Then into a huge tub containing the sack of Scorched Grass from the kit to which I added the smaller bag of Glade Grass and a tub of Antenoceti's Workshop Steppe Grass. This was applied shaken through a sieve which prevents clumps. Once a decent thickness is achieved I pat it down to weld it into the glue. Turn the tile on its end and give it a few good whacks to dislodge the loose grass. Then, when COMPLETELY dry you gently brush watered down PVA (roughly 1:3 dilution) over the grass to make it all but bombproof.]

Finally I added some very short moss tufts to the rocks, some longer grass tufts and a few little bushes with coarse turf and some drifts of leaves with the leaf litter seed pod things from Antenoceti's Workshop. As I've mentioned before a tip with the coarse turf is to "inject" it with a dropper full of watered down PVA. It'll dry firm and resilient.

And that's it! I've got a gaming table! Huzzah! Expect to see more scenery bits on here as I turn it from blasted moorland, first into woodlands and then (hopefully) a rural idyll.

TTFN

Windmills on my Mind Part 1 - Review and Construction

Today we're looking at something a little different to our normal fare of tiny plastic men. I'm starting to turn my attention to the ground they stand on too. Now, it would be sensible to start with the gaming table, and I am, but something arrived at the weekend that has me waaay to excited to wait.

This post was nearly titled "Round like a Circle in a Spiral" but that was waaaay to oblique.

The something is the excellent Tabletop World windmill and will be the start of a whole wee model model village. Charlie over at the Beard Bunker is already building a nifty town out of their larger dwellings so I'm working on a more rural aesthetic. Fields, farms, a windmill, the whole nine yards. Given that Tabletop World are based in Croatia, their exposure here in Blighty isn't all that great so I thought I'd do this project as a review/build log/tutorial doodad. Starting with review:

Caution, potential hyperbole ahead. I simply cannot praise Tabletop World's output highly enough. Lets go through the reasons why. First, the material: Yes, resin isn't my favourite (I think plastic is the natural material for wargaming) but this resin is superb. It's solid, strong, sturdy, a nice clean cream colour that helps to show off the detail even before you paint it and best of all the total lack of bubbles. They must be pressure casting as the quality is better than anything I've seen. Next; the casting method: I'll straight up admit, I have no idea, none, how on earth they keep their moulds intact. Almost everything they make is full of gorgeous deep undercuts to give that rich detail and cast in as few pieces as possible. Whole buildings are in two and three chunks. It surely has to eat the mould silicone. Finally we come to the real deal. The sculpting. These guys literally build their pieces stone by modelled stone. They don't carve mortar lines in, they build whole houses. Their wood shingles have proper wood-grain and chunks missing. There's even full interior detailing on most of their buildings (not the windmill unfortunately) including neat provisions in sacks and boxes.

Granted, their prices are justifiably a little higher than some similar things out there but the quality is a serious bump. If you see scenery simply as a means of blocking lines of sight then frankly, I'd look at MDF stuff, it's cheaper and it'll do the same job. But. If you are like us (by which I include the Beard Bunker crew) and think that lovingly painted and realistic miniatures deserve a lovingly painted and realistic landscape to fight over then they can't be beaten in my opinion. Good terrain tells stories just as effectively as well posed miniatures. Battlefields can be re-positionable dioramas that really enhance the game. It makes me so sad to see some of the tournament spaces in the world pitting fantastically painted forces over plain green mdf grass and cardboard box houses. I know there's a cost/effect criteria in effect there and the situations aren't comparable but there surely should be a middle ground. Anyway, enough of that. On with some assembly:

There really is only one job to do on this model, reinforcing the joins of the arms of the windmill. Normally when pinning there is the awkward task of lining up the pin holes. On something like this you can automatically line up the holes by simply pushing straight up through the pilot holes you've drilled already. Press the arm into position and then drill up through the holes you've drilled in the shaft and continue up into the arms. Hard to describe, hence, photos. Eventually the various bits will be pinned together with wire but for now I left it in sub-assemblies for ease of painting. I marked which arms match to which sockets as each will be in a slightly different place and you might as well get it right. Now, on to painting:

Having watched Charlie all but weep tears of blood trying to get these to prime properly with spray cans I figured another path needed to be found. See, those lovely deep cuts that make painting a joy make proper priming something of a nightmare. Owning an airbrush already I figured that the vallejo surface primer would be a good choice. I was right. Using the airbrush means that you can change the angles on the hop so you can cover all the cracks evenly. I still had to do two coats, one from above, one from beneath but the whole process took only about 12 minutes or so. Even better, from that 200ml tub of paint I used maybe 8ml of it doing the whole building. I'd have expected to use about a quarter of a can of spray paint. This way can save a bunch of propellant expense. Granted, you need a airbrush first but if you can keep it rolling through an equivalent ten cans of spray you'll pay most of it back. Plus it does other stuff. Probably not enough to recommend owning an airbrush on this alone but another reason I'm happy to have one.

While I had the airbrush out I thought I'd steal a march on the woodwork. A coat of Model Air Camo Black-Brown started the process nicely. When I've figured out what I'm going to use on the stones then I'll do the same. More in part two, where we'll take it from basecoat to finished and if there's time add the weathering, if not, heck, there'll be a part three :)

TTFN

Gaming Table Showcase

Last time I showed you our best shots of the game we played. The table was awesome and it was far, far from the only awesome table there. Today therefore I show you what were - in my opinion - the best tables at Warhammer World.

Tau jungle table, huge!

The water looks awesome. I'd have drabbed down the foliage with matt varnish but that is a minor gripe.

Love this combination of large Bastion and Skyshield, the blending of the colour into the board makes it wonderful too.

From the same table, this warhound wreck looked awesome, where else will you find £245 scatter terrain?

This Osgiliath suburbs table was made from cast plaster and a realm of battle. The buildings were great.

This Khemri table didn't photograph as well as I had hoped. Subtle changes in tone make a splendid monochrome gaming table.

Chaos Wastes table with tortured ground formed into massive skulls.

The huge astronomers tower, deathknell watch and witchfate tor mash-up from the Chaos Wastes table.

Charlie correctly pointed out that the massive city table needed some more details to make it feel "lived in" but the sheer scale of the thing was awesome.

For me though the broad-strokes ideas were inspirational. Just a couple of plates from the Shrine of the Aquilla kit made an Imperium-scale gateway. Worked too as you can see from the scratches.

Another Skyshield mashup. Mine is already together but I really feel that if I do another it will be built into a larger structure.

My favourite element of the city table. This bridge is so simple but so effective. Then there is the cathedral behind it, immense!

While I will never have the resources or space to make these sorts of tables (heck, it's why we go to Nottingham for Nerd Thunder events) the inspiration that seeing something like that and then adapting it for a smaller scale is worth the trip alone.

Next time we will be back to my painting but until then...

TTFN.