Things to fight on and over and in

After a few weeks of working in the evenings I've caught up with my proper job. Now I have some hobby time.
I've been looking at gaming mats but they are stunningly expensive. Whiles walking through Wilko yesterday I spied as dust sheet. Its plastic backed and made of an open cotton weave. It was £10 and best of all it was 12ft by 9ft. So I bought it and trotted off to the art shop to buy some spray paints and started to spray it. I then went back again today to buy some more green. It took 3 cans of green and 1/2 can each of olive green and a light brown

Hanging on the washing ready to paint

Day 1 end, 1/3 painted

Done

The full gloriousness of it. I really like it and hopefully it will work well and not bad for £28.

A few weeks ago I bought 6 mdf buildings from ebay  for about £22. I've painted them up and they look pretty good with a pebbledashed coating

Finally I bought a load of fine grained, firm expanded polystyrene blocks about 4" long for a few pence only

The block

The carve up nicely and make cool walls.

Secret Santa, Hills and the Alnwick Vampires

The Willey's are running their Secret Santa thing again this year and it was great fun last year trawling a new blog to find presents and I got a really great garden set for VBCW. So I signed up again. For my Santa my Christmas list is anything 28mm VBCW or Colonial African (or oddly enough some 28mm Mega City Judges - see below)
My experiences in Matt Crump's dungeon have made me want to improve my terrain so I've made a couple of papier mache hills, using shop bought hills as templates

As usual the photography is shocking

Finally I've been working on 3 VBCW units. The Alnwick Vampires.

The strange tale of the hunchback vampire that stalked the ground of the castle

bringing terror to the peasants, was the most famously recorded by a medieval

chronicler named William de Newburgh. Lord Percy has unleashed his secret police on Northumberland and the locals quickly called them the Alnwick Vampires and warned their children to be careful in case the Vampires get them

These 3 groups are the command groups for the 3 squads of Vampires and are Empress Spanish Civil War Republican Assault squad command figures. I bought them from Col Bill and were £32 for 28 figures. The figures are great but the grey uniforms were a bugger to paint with lots of subtle shading need - obviously you can't see this in the photos

Finally I've been buying lots of bits and pieces, flock etc. and at the tail end of the Warlord Judge Dredd sale the Angel Gang for £12.50 and free postage. I got the rules as well but they were free.

House

I bought this Tudor style house at the Border Reiver show, can't remember who from but it was only a tenner. Why are resin figures more expensive then metal ones yet resin houses are cheaper than mdf ones? Answers on a post card to the usual address.
Anyway there was very little flash and almost no trimming to make it fit was needed. Generally very nice. Painting was slow and labourious, it took a whole night to paint the bloody roof slates, I think slate may be inappropriate and they should have been clay or shingles but I had the colour.
It will make a nice addition to most of my battle fields

I've also had a couple of small deliveries but I'll wait to post those as I want to paint some for my next drubbing by Matt Crump in his dungeon in a couple of weeks

All Along the Watchtower

I have fought a very brief and bloody battle, post later or tomorrow. I have done loads of stuff though. I've been trying to get my painting going but not really in the mood. I have painted this Mayan warrior that I picked up at the Border Reiver show for £1.

This figure clearly demonstrates why I paint lots of figures. I really tried to take my time with this and really up my painting standard and it's turned out fine but it is no better than my normal standard - I like to think I paint to a good wargaming standard and I'm normally pretty proud of the output. If I wasn't happy then I'd take up gardening. Whilst i think I am constantly improving, I have plateaued. My standard is about this level no matter how many I paint, sometimes a little better sometimes a little worse. Looks like another points record for the challenge.

Enough therapy. Mainly I've been building watchtowers from card, garden cane, coffee stirrers

I built 4 of these

The walls I made ages ago

Now it's a fort - nice.

From the left over ends I made some fences

I went to the market to buy a painting for my Dad's birthday and found this. A road roller for £3. very VBCW

Finally on my way home I noticed that a new Hobbycraft superstore had opened so I popped in and bought a rubber cliff mould and some plaster of paris

Off to build a big hill now

Good Fences make Good..erm Terrain Features

The Analogue Hobbies Community webchats have been somewhat inspirational, although I couldn't make the connection work today with Paul down under. I could see him and listen to him playing Prince but he couldn't see or hear me - or I'm just not interesting enough.
I have been painting a lot of terrain

1st up some wooden fences for my African village. These are made from sticks in the garden

I added some lichen, again from the garden.

All villages need an entrance and I carved these to massive tusks out of  some more sticks, I appear to love whittling.

The African Tribe are Les Cheveaux Rouge (The Red Skulls) - one of those Boys Own tribes full of terrible rites and cannibalism. The skulls are 10mm resin beads I bought from China on e bay. £1.49 for 40 with free postage. An unbelievable price. Luckily post Brexit we will have free trade with China so that we can export all our manufactured goods to them. No wait that is bollocks, we make nothing they want at the price we would sell it. Sorry for swearing but I'm still in post Brexit shock and it's not getting better. 

Couple of piles of logs, sticks and lichen - notice a theme here

I've painted up the Irregular Miniatures pigs - more like hogs although I don't really know the difference

Steel Railings. I've had these for ages but not got round to painting them. 

There are 2 types, both for railways and they look pretty good.

Have a good weekend 

Pygmy Hack

With Blaxkleric getting out Lost Patrol I thought I'd have a go myself. The problem is I don't own the game, have no hex terrain tiles and no Sci Fi figs at all, never mind any 40K.
Still not to be deterred I made my own tiles with sides of 6cm, if you don't know how to cut hexes you need a compass. For 6cm sides make the circle 6cm radius. once you've drawn your circle move the compass to the circle edge and make a mark 6cm way on the circumference. move the compass to the new mark and make a new 6cm mark on circumference. Repeat until you have 6 markes and returned to the start Join the dots and cut out. I made my tiles out of thick card from the covers of ring binders.
Once cut out I painted them with Wilko tester pots and some poster paints. Leaf shapes were stamped on using a carved potato, I was channeling my 10 year old self with making shapes and potato printing.

Of course the genius thing is that tiles can have 2 sides so I painted the other side grey and drew rocks with a marker pen. DaDaah a cave system

I then lacquered both sides and left to dry for a couple of hours. This was not long enough and they stuck together, which was very very annoying and a schoolboy error. The tiles are ok but have plucked a little bit.

So the next move was to play. I decided to have a safari of 3 women - Hetty, Hilda and Helga - with a female scout, Hebe trying to find their way out a Pygmy "infested" Jungle.

Tiles would be drawn at random and visibility was a maximum of 2 tiles down a straight path but blocked by curves. Once a tile was out of sight it would be removed and added to the pile.

Everytime a European entered a tile or remained in one a D6 was rolled

1. Nothing

2. D3 arrow shots from Jungle but no visible Pygmies

3. D3 arrow shots from Jungle and the Pygmies appear

4. D3 Pygmies with spears ambush the Europeans

5. D6 Pygmies with spears ambush the Europeans

6. D6 Pygmies with spears ambush the Europeans. If Europeans have entered a new tile and it is not a dead end then roll again and if a 6 then this is the exit tile and if Europeans survive then they have won. Pygmies win if all Europeans are killed.

Order of combat is missle fire (3 to hit for the women and 4 for pygmies, 4 to kill for Europeans and 5 for Pygmies. Melee is simultaneous with +2 for Europeans and 5 to kill

The Europeans started in clearing with 2 exits

They advanced with some ineffective hidden arrow shots whizzing about their ears only to reach a dead end

They returned to the starting clearing only to find it was no longer there, damn jungle. As they advanced around a bend Hilda was faced with a belligerent Pygmy but their fight was a draw and this stalled the advance.

The next 2 turns saw Hilda still unable to kill the Pygmy and 3 archers and a spearman appeared to kill the Europeans. The Pygmies shooting was poor and the fights with Hilda and Hebe were again draws

eventually Hilda killed the Pygmy on the path and the other 3  killed 2 more and advanced past her as she fought the last Pygmy. Helga advanced further and Hilda was faced with 3 more Pygmies. The Europeans were now spread out over the path and were facing Pygmies everywhere. Hilda was in deep trouble out numbered 4 to 1. Helga, Hetty and Hebe killed their opponents and Hebe ran back to aid Hilda,

Hebe was killed but Hilda was still in their swinging.

Helga is downed by an arrow from a hidden archer

Hetty is then speared by a Pygmy and Hilda is finally overcome and falls to her knees with here arms reaching for the sky.

This was very enjoyable but needs tweaking. It was too hard to kill once you had one the combat and I will tweak that so that you can advance to the jungle faster.

Anglican League Fast Scout Car and a pond, oh and some hedges

So yesterday I bought a 2 seater 1930's sports car and decided to turn it into a fast recce car for the Anglican League

I did a camo paint job and added a radio (forgot to paint the aerial), an LMG (ammo feed is on wrong side but who cares). The 2 figures are white plastic figures from the art shop you know the sort that  get added to models of buildings. Little large (32mm) but they fit in the car very nicely. I just added some hats. 

Looks a little basic but does look very fast, idea for scouting and hit an run attacks

I recently saw a link to this tutorial on a blog (can't remember whose blog). It uses Poundland Epoxy Resin to make water effects. I've used the Poundland stuff before (I use their PVA as you get loads for £1 and it works).

So as a trial I made this pond (I've never used any form of "modelling water before). The trick is to paint the base the could you want for the water - I used a green brown. The pond too a whole tube of the resin - they don't seal back too well 

Not a good picture - too sunny today but had an hour to kill before this afternoon's BBQ

Finally I made some hedges out of pan scourers which I flocked. If only Poundland knew what their stuff was used for

These are small but Those are far away

Went to the Durham wargames show today. Had a nice time, met Roy Williamson and spent too much money. I always suffer a degree of regret on leaving these shows, there are things I wish I'd bought and things I wish I hadn't, hindsight is bleedin' awful . Did enjoy the show though. Didn't take any photos as my hands were full. The venue is small but about the right size. The demonstration games looked cool and I wish I played the Grimsby Wargamers Zulu game, it looked great.
I bought some more VBCW figures, this time from Reiver Castings, a local company with an eclectic catalogue. I bought some Highland infantry in kilts and Tam O' Shanters. I was looking for some mortars but despite making them in 20mm and making civilian artillery crews they didn't make 28mm scale mortars. They were surprised at this omission from their ranges and offered to send me a couple of 20mm scale 81mm mortars to use as 60mm mortars for free to go with the civilian crews I bought. I think I've just expanded their range and as a reward for their generosity I bought a Lloyd-Carden carrier. Good business for both parties.

The main reason for going was that I had pre-ordered some figures from Pendraken - my first foray into anything other than 28mm since I was 14. Hence the title and not just an excuse to link to the funniest scene from Father Ted, if not in the history of the world. If you've never seen Father Ted then you must watch it, and Black Books.

I had ordered an 1864 Danish division and an equivalent Prussian division to fight the 2nd Schleswig war.

These look really great and I also found 6 x 4 horse ACW limbers from Colonel Bill's which will work nicely with both sets of forces with a little tweaking. Got the maths wrong and only bought enough Prussians to build 800 strong battalions not the 1000 required. however going back to reading "Bismarks First War" by Michael Embree the Prussians didn't call up their reserves and so were only 800 strong. If this period turns out to be as interesting as I think then there is lots of potential for bringing in the other European nations.

At the Bring and Buy sale there were bargains galore, including a 1:200 WW2 German Armoured Division fully painted for £15 which I wish I'd bought. What I did buy was "A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages". Volume 1 by Sir Charles Osman, I already have Vol 2. I also bought a selection of 10mm buildings for £8

Finally I have been building some terrain for 10mm and stumbled across this website for a paper model of a German village in 10mm. The building are great and in full colour, although I only printed them in black and white.

Unfinished village

And finally my current favourite song - Thunder Road - not the one you were expecting and I do love the original