Links of Interest, 17 August 2020

Nice little sculpting tutorial on doing feathers in greenstuff from JuanHidalgo Miniatures. I really like short, approachable tutorials like this, it’s something specific to concentrate on if (like me) you’re not much good with sculpting!

Speaking of YouTube, Dr Alexander Clarke has an interesting channel with WW2 and interwar naval stuff, mostly British. Similarly, Drachinifel does mostly WW2 naval history videos as well, more American navy but some others.

Boom & Zoom Graphics have a set of really approachable, humourous, but (far as I can tell) complete introductions to WW2 aircraft markings, painting, and camo, with entries for each of the major combatants. Superb reference for WW2 air if that’s largely a new field to you as it is to me!

More Small Scale Scenery Inspiration

There aren’t a lot of small scale scenery tutorials out there, either as videos or traditional blog post writeups. Viv on RubbishInRubbishOut, though, did some YouTube videos of Dystopian Wars scenery a few years ago, and it turns out that DW is in something approximating 1/1200 scale, more or less.

Table intro, part one of four.

Dystopian Wars table intro, painting & finishing the table, islands part one, and finally islands part two.

Also, Dispatches from the Front has been working on some fantasy naval scenery for Man’O’War using the Brigade Models buildings and it looks fantastic. Fantasy microscale terrain has a definite appeal, you can get grandiose epic terrain on the table that wouldn’t work at all in any larger scale!

Fifty (or so) Tiny Buildings

I’ve finished painting the last buildings of my first Brigade Models Small Scale Scenics order, before I start in on painting the buildings and scenic bits I got in my second Brigade order. This batch has the British town, village, and suburban buildings I didn’t use previously, a bunch of industrial buildings, and a couple of lighthouses.

The cutting mat in all of these photos is a one inch/half inch grid, for scale. The largest of these buildings is less than two inches long, and the smokestacks are all between an inch and an inch and a quarter tall.

In progress industrial buildings, in various shades of grubby brick. Click for larger.
Walled farmyards and various houses and such behind. Click for larger.
Everything all finished and off the painting sticks. Industrial buildings over on the left, two churches and a variety of detached houses centre, various town/village buildings on the right. Farms in the background. Click for larger.
The industrial buildings, churches, and a variety of houses. Click for larger.
Town and village buildings, and some more large detached houses on the right. Click for larger.
The farmyards, still with some work to do on the actual yards but the buildings complete at least. Click for larger.
Lighthouses and Martello towers. Click for larger.
A streetscape of sorts, most of the village/town buildings pushed together roughly with the larger church behind. Keep in mind most of these buildings are about 1/4 inch wide! Click for larger.

Now that these are all done they’re getting varnished and then put back into storage for now, so that I can move on and finish some more partially finished projects before I come back to building more coastal modules and starting on the buildings from my second Brigade order.

Blinds & Markers for WW2 Naval Gaming

Most naval rules have spotting and target ID rules of some sort or another, often with various stages of “we think something’s out there” through “there’s probably a ship over there” to “It’s a German S-boat and it has started shooting at us!” or similar.

For example, Coastal Patrol published by TwoFatLardies uses both Blinds (for small groups of ships or dummies) and Markers (for possible individual ships, or dummies) so I’ve done up both 2″ and 1″ numbered tokens, designed to be printed on light card and then punched out or cut out for tabletop use.

The current PDF covers all the major combatants – the British Royal Navy, German Kriegsmarine, Italian Regia Marina, United States Navy, and Imperial Japanese Navy, and also includes generic Red Force & Blue Force markers, all numbered 1 through 12 in both 2″ and 1″ sizes. It’s available in both Letter (for those of us in North America) and A4 (for the rest of the world) for easy printing.

I might do up a second set of extra markers numbered 13 through 24 for larger scenarios; that would be straightforward enough.

Earlier this year I also did up a simple set of printable Star Shell & Moon Markers for naval gaming that you might also find useful.

If there’s any other combatants you’d like to see added to a future set, please let me know in the comments. Some of the larger Commonwealth navies, the Soviets, the smaller European nations?