All work and play... with added foamcore!

I guess as I'm a Town Planner by day, it should be no surprise that one of the aspects of the hobby I enjoy is making scenery, more specifically buildings. Sadly I'm not very quick at it!

Over the years much of my attention has inevitably focused on Warhammer, and buildings compatible with my human armies (Empire and Dogs of War). I'm always sketching ideas for buildings (often in the more dull type of meeting, in the margins of my notebook), sometimes inspired by buildings I see out and about or through work (protecting built heritage is part of the job). Here's the collection so far:

Anyone who's been to Derby might spot 'Ye Olde Dolphin' pub just to the right of centre

For construction I usually use 5mm foamcore board; it's relatively cheap, easy to work with, takes paint well and is quite sturdy. Details are added using balsa off-cuts (for the timber framing), card and, occassionally, textured plasticard and wallpaper. The roof tiles are from cereal packet card. The first few I did one tile at a time. Realising that I wasn't going to live to the age of 500, I've since cut back to doing them line by line instead!

Here are a couple of buildings I have 'in progress' to show the construction detail:

This will be a 'posh' town house - loosely based on a building in Derby city centre

and this one's a corner shop,based on sketches of old building's in the 'Shambles' of Chesterfield, where the butchers would originally have traded from open stalls

And a sketch for another one, this time based on 'The Old Grammar School', a preserved medieval house near Birmingham (I think this was the result of an extremely tedious team meeting).



I've also done a few buildings for friends, including three buildings for my Friend Matt. He wanted something that he could transport easily to tournaments, so I came up with three buildings: a Manor, Cottage and Hut, that would fit inside each other for transport.

The 'Russian Doll' houses, prior to painting

Of course my dream is to be able to fill an entire table with buildings and do a fantasy/medieval cityfight. Maybe when I retire... ;-)

First of 2011

Just a quick post to show the first couple of completed minis from 2011.

First up, a GW 'Last Chancer', painted up for the Sheffield Irregulars January painting challenge 'wounded'

Second is a Copplestone mini from the 'Scavvie Tankbusters' pack.

He'll join my partisans and other 'irregulars' for SF skirmish gaming.

Both were photographed in the new, portable studio my lovely wife got me for Christmas.

Looking back (or, "He's behind you!")

January 's traditionally the time for looking back and evaluating. So I've waited until February...

I thought I'd take a quick look back over 2010, particularly at progress on painting and gaming, and maybe think about what to tackle this year. Overall, "10", as I cam to know it, was a bit of a diverse year. I started a couple of projects, managed to complete some long standing ones and even found time to enter a couple of the Sheffield Irregulars painting challenges (I even managed to win one with a Tau entry although, admittedly, there were only two other entries...). So, what were the other highlights?

• Painted some 'old skool' 40K Imperial Army
• Finished a platoon of Copplestone Neo-Sovs and Partisans/Insurgents for games of Fast and Dirty
• Finally painted that Old Crow Lander
• Upgraded some of the characters and units for my Empire Army
• Started a 20mm WWII project thanks to unearthing some old 1:72nd figures and some cheap Shermans
  

Gaming wise I didn't do that well. Apart from a couple of games at Warhammer World with Matt (who's now gone off travelling the world, how inconsiderate), I didn't get much gaming in.

In all, could have done better. However I have had to contend with busy times at work and a house that, in the latter half of the year, was practically a permanent building site. For some months I couldn't even get near the painting table because of stuff stored around it.

Sadly I haven't managed to make much headway until recently on my proposed Tau Army. To be honest I'm not really feeling the love on this one. I've also been having a bit of a think about just how many part started projects I have, and it's quite alarming! Amongst the front runners are:

• More units for the Empire Army, in particular I have some old style Reiksgard and Knights Panther units and a Griffon to tackle (and still haven't done a Free Company)
• Several half completed 'medieval' buildings (including city walls) to finish, plus a pile of plastic food trays to turn into and SF colony
  
• A near complete platoon of Copplestone Troopers (just needing basing and a couple of specialists)
• More old Citadel Imperial Army and Ogre models to paint, just because I love 'em
• That 40K Tau Army

This year I need to be more ruthless in getting projects finished. I'm going to keep track of my expenditure on gaming and sell off some stuff I'm almost certainly never going to get around to using. Oh, and try really hard not to start new projects (at least until some of the above list is done).

Yeah, good luck with that.... ;-)

Next stop Paris

Just a few more pics of the ongoing WWII project. I've just finished (apart from decals, which I don't have yet) a pair of Armourfast StugIIIs. These are nice little models, very quick to build. The detail is pretty basic, particularly on pieces like the tracks, but fine at for gaming. They seem pretty robust too (I've dropped one already). The reason for the two different colour schemes is that I was testing out which combinations of colours worked best. I still can't decide which I prefer...
Second up are some buildings. Most of my 28mm scale scenery will work fine for Western Europe: trees, hills hedges and so on; however buildings are a different matter. These two are resin models from Airfix. They're described as 1:76 scale, so look a little small next to most models up close, but at gaming distance they should be fine. Longer term they could probably do with being mounted on bases with some rubble.

Tech Adept

This month's painting challenge from the Sheffield Irregulars was simply "Red". I had an old GW Adeptus Mechanicus model that had a pretty poor paintjob (I was younger back then), so out he came for a repaint. I wanted a look that suggested that the 'organic' components, including robes, were rather neglected, in contrast to antique but very well cared for technology. Hope that's how its come out!

The Yanks are Coming!

Here's the first completed WWII US Infantry I've done. These are from an old matchbox set. A lot are missing, including the .50cal and mortar, although the set never had a very wide range of equipment in the first place (no BARs, carbines or Thompsons for example). They are nice sculpts however and were quick and fun to paint, taking washes well for shading. All in, when complete I'll have about twenty of these guys (some aren't based yet), barely enough for a severely understrength platoon, so I'm going to have to invest in some more, possibly the nice models from Italieri (although they're apparently a bit taller, so I'm not sure how well they'll mix).


I've painted them in something vaguely akin the the M1943 uniform (although a handful are in older style colours), so these guys are either late war or fresh arrivals to Europe post D-Day. US uniforms in this period are the cause of some confusion when it comes to picking colours!

I've also added a bit more German infantry, this time some old airfix models, and started detailing a couple of Armourfast Stugs (not happy with it yet, so no photos).

A bit of a preview

I blame the mother-in-law.

No really! If she hadn't gone shopping with my wife in Derby, I wouldn't have found myself in Modelzone in the Westfield Centre, contemplating what I could do with a 1/72 scale die-cast Sherman tank at £3.99! Or two...

Like many gamers I guess, the seeds of the hobby were probably sewn on childhood carpets, playing with soldiers from the likes of airfix and matchbox. And yet strangely enough I've never done any WWII gaming. Well thanks to those Shermans, and a pile of old model railway terrain inherited from my Grandad (and which has to come out of the attic soon anyway, so the builder can get to work) that's the plan. The aim (optimistically) will be that this will be a project with low time investment. Apart from buildings, I can mostly use my existing scenery collection; by using 1/72 scale figs (many of which are hang overs from those old carpet wars, plus some additions) I hopefully won't get too precious about paintjobs; and for vehicles I'm going to use a mix of die-casts (there's a good range out there these days) and stuff from the likes of armourfast.

I'm also going to try and keep that inner button counter under control. If I want to have a 76mm Sherman on the table and all I have is a model with a 105, I shall not give a fig!

Here's the first batch, the beginnings of a German infantry platoon (I'm working on two Armourfast StugIIIs for support). Next up should be some US Infantry.