All posts by Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.

A Red Nieuport, Part Three

Got the star insignia finished up on the Bolshevik Nieuport 17. Some of the stars are a bit wonky, but frankly that’s historically accurate — a lot of actual insignia during the Russian Civil War had a definite hand-painted look to it!

I gave up on the red-and-white striped vertical tail as a bad job, and went with solid red to go along with the red cowling at the nose.

red17_23
Painting all done on the Nieuport, Now to swear the upper wing into position!

Now to get the upper wing into position, always a job likely to provoke swearing. At least the Nieuport only has six struts, instead of the even dozen on the SPAD! After that there’s just the landing gear and prop disc to do.

A Red Nieuport, Part Two

Got started on the insignia for the Bolshevik Nieuport. This is going to involve at least six freehand red stars; to skip one pair I’ve decided to go with a red-and-white striped tail, although freehand stripes might make freehand stars look easy…

Anyway, here’s the current state of the beast. Like the SPAD, this Nieuport has roundels moulded right into the wing surfaces, so I’ve used those to put the stars in white circles. This appears to have been fairly common on Bolshevik aircraft, for the simple reason that the Imperial Russian Air Service roundel had to be blanked out somehow!

red21apr
The Bolshie Nieuport upside down, showing four of the six Red stars on it. The upper wing has insignia on both the upper and lower surfaces of the wing, which was fairly common for Nieuports.

The insignia and tail stripes will get at least one more coat of paint, and they need some cleanup, then highlighting. Colours, for anyone following along at home, are Reaper Master Series Clotted Red and Reaper MS Leather White; highlights will be with Reaper MS Pure White and Carnage Red. I might yet abandon the striped tail in favour of a red tail, possibly with white star. It depends on how frustrated freehand pinstriping gets me…

A Red Nieuport, Part One

Having built the White Russians a SPAD (Parts One, Two, Three), it’s time to build the Nieuport 17 for my Bolshevik forces!

As I mentioned in my original RCW Aviation article, the basic scheme for the Nieuport in Red service will be silver/grey dope with as many red stars as I can stand to freehand onto the thing. At a minimum, I”m committed to six: two on the vertical tail, two on the upper surface of the top wing, two on the lower surface of the bottom wing. Nieuports, because of their very small bottom wing, often had insignia on the lower surface of the upper too. We shall see.

Thankfully the Reds freehanded their star insignia too, so lumpy, misshapen and odd stars abound!

Here’s all the kit parts laid out on my cutting mat. Only about two dozen parts all told, and a much simpler strut setup than the SPAD which will hopefully be easier to assemble than the SPAD’s upper wing… (the fuselage is in two halves, I just had them popped together to check the fit when I took this photo.)

red17_19Apr
The Testors Classic Nieuport 17 kit all laid out.

Here’s the current state of the Nieuport. Basic assembly of fuselage and lower wing done, and basecoat of silver, red (on the nose) and white (on the tail) done.

red17_20Apr
The Bolshevik Nieuport 17, base colours done, ready for insigia then weathering.

On to freehand stars!

Half-Timber & Rural British Architecture

The English Civil War has become a definite back-burner project around here, but it is still around, along with ambitions to make some more Western European/British buildings and other scenery for dual use in both ECW and pulp gaming. Dark deeds in the pastoral countryside, that sort of thing, whether it’s with horse and musket or Mauser and sporty roadster!

It turns out that the ever-valuable Internet Archive (previously here on the Warbard) is stuffed with old books on English traditional architecture and buildings. Here’s a fairly random sampling of ones that caught my eye as being useful for inspiring suitable wargaming terrain.

Finally, you can find many more books in this vein by searching the Internet Archive’s Texts collection for Architecture, Domestic — England.

The Shire Publications book Discovering Timber-Framed Buildings is one I’ve seen recommended several places. As usual, check the various other recommendations Amazon and other customers make, good stuff there too. Shire do a whole series of inexpensive English history books that look very useful for those of us who aren’t in the UK but want some inspiration and authentic local details.

Inspired and begun by a thread over on Frothers Unite, of all places.

Towel Thatch, A Photo Tutorial

A few people on the Lead Adventure Forum and elsewhere have asked how the thatch on my various Russian buildings was done, and I”ve been promising some in-progress photos.

I got those shot last month, and finally sat down to edit the pictures and write this tutorial. The basic materials are mattboard (good-quality picture framing card, used for most of the underlying roof structure), light card (used to bridge the spaces between the mattboard pieces and support the towel) and a cheap hand towel I picked up at the nearby dollar store, for the actual thatch.

The roofs pictured below are more complex than many, first because they’re hipped roofs, with all four sides sloping inward, and second because both buildings I happened to be building while I took these pictures have a complex floorplan, one T-shaped and the other L-shaped. I’ll discuss some of the peculiarities of doing towel thatch over a hipped roof in a bit.

I also design most of my roofs to be removable, which complicates design of the underlying structure. All that aside, the basic towel thatching technique is going to be basically the same for a simple gable roof permanently attached to a building or a complex removable roof like I’m doing here!

thatch1
The roof structure - about as complex as a model roof is ever hopefully going to get!

Above, the main structure of mattboard, with light card over some of the bigger gaps in strips. I don’t bother trying to cover the whole roof, the towel is more than strong enough to support itself once all the glue on it is dry. A simple gabled roof with one ridgeline is obviously going to be a lot simpler!

thatch2
Towel being glued down, cut oversized so it hangs well over the eves.

On this T-shaped roof, I started the sheet of towel on the top of the T, after putting glue over the card and along the edges of the mattboard pieces, then folded it over the main ridgeline and across the ends. I cut the towel on the hip roof ends and in the valley where the stem of the T goes out, and in several places removed triangles of towel to avoid having multiple layers of fabric piled up. The cut edges got an extra smear of white glue worked into them with a fingertip, to secure and help disguise the edge.

For these roofs, because they were complex enough already, I’ve gone with a single layer of towel, but you can get a nice extra effect by starting with strips of towel, and gluing them up from the eve toward the ridge of the roof in slightly overlapping stips. Real thatch is often laid in layers, and this recreates the look nicely. See my older English Civil War barn article for an example of thatch with strips of towel.

thatch4
An illustrated explanation of how to fit towelling around a hipped roof's ends. With scissors, cut upward from the eve to the end of the ridge, removing a triangle of towel, then glue the ends over each other with an extra smear of glue to hide the edges.

The photo above should explain how to fit the towel around the sloped ends of a hipped roof, removing triangles of towel to avoid having massive amounts of overlapping fabric.

After the towel has been fitted to the roof, leave the whole thing to dry for a while. Note that the towel is hanging well over the eves at this point, and to keep that fabric from being glued to the table, I’ve propped the whole roof up on a couple of bottles of craft paint. I don’t use the building itself, because I want these roofs to be removable and the next step could easily glue my roofs down to the building by accident!

That’s because the next step is to saturate the towel with dilute white glue. I mix a jar of roughly two parts water to one part white glue, well mixed, then apply it liberally with a big paintbrush, a 1.5″ household brush I use for all sorts of scenery painting. You might think a soaking in watery glue would wreck or warp the underlying cardboard structure, but I’ve done four buildings this way in the last few months and none have warped noticeably.

Remember that you are dealing with towel. It will soak up your glue-water mix like, well, towel. Dab gently with the paintbrush, you don’t want to push the towel around or wrinkle it. After it’s well painted with your glue-water mix, leave the roof in a warm place at least overnight to dry.

thatch3
After the glue-water mix dries, your thatch will be solid and pretty much self-supporting. Time to trim the eves with scissors, then slap on the first coat of paint. I use black primer, but I could probably have just started with a black towel...

After your roof dries overnight, the glue-soaked towel is basically strong enough to stand up on it’s own. Now you can trim the eves back accurately with scissors, making sure to fit the roof to the building (if it’s removable like mine are) to get a good fit and ensure the eves look good and even.

After that, basecoat with a dark colour, I go straight for black, and mix a bit more white glue into the paint to further strengthen the roof. This is also your chance to trim or re-glue any seams or areas you missed during initial construction. You could skip some of this by just starting with a black or dark brown towel — I started with tan as that was the least-objectionable colour the cheap towel I use came in.

After the black basecoat is finished, I do two drybrush coats to bring the texture of the towel out and make it look like tatch. The first, fairly heavy drybrush is with a 1:1 mix of light brown and grey paint; the second drybrush is brighter, more tan or light brown and less grey in the mix, and i concentrate on the ridgelines of the roof, to make the shape “pop” a bit. You could do more of a straw/yellow colour to your thatch, but real thatch almost always weathers to a grey/brown/black colour fairly quickly.

thatch5
From left to right, a finished building, with thatch painted as described in the text. Centre, unpainted but with eves trimmed. Right, black basecoat only on the thatch, awaiting it's two drybrush coats.

Finally, a photo from my earlier posting about the two buildings featured in this article, with everything finished except the fence on the L-shaped building. You can see the drybrushed finish that brings out the texture on the towel, and the slight highlighting of the ridges and edges of the roofs.

rusbldg_22Mar
A pair of new, larger Russian-style buildings for our 28mm RCW games. Click for larger.

Hopefully this helps someone out there tackle their own thatch roof from towel. Remember that the roofs I’ve used as illustration for this article are at about the outer limit of complexity for a thatch roof, being hipped, T- or L-shaped and removable all at once! A simple gable roof can just use a single strip of towel, up one side and down the other; this gets even easier if you build permanent roofs instead of removable ones.

Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies has an interesting article on using putty for thatch, if you don’t want to try towel. I’ll have to give that a shot on the next small building I do, although I think towel is easier and more economical on larger buildings.

Any comments, suggestions or questions, fire them into the comments below and I”ll do my best to respond.

White Cossacks vs Red Machineguns

Introduced another local gamer to our Mud & Blood-powered Russian Civil War gaming on Sunday afternoon, it was a good little game although my attacking Whites kind of stampeded his defending Bolsheviks, despite the heavy machinegun they had to assist.

The scenario was another lift out of the great M&B scenario book, Stout Hearts & Iron Troopers, this time the very first scenario, “Attack on a Strongpoint”, which has two infantry sections with an HMG defending against an attacking platoon.

My attacking Whites were able to stay mostly in cover until they were very close to the edge of the hamlet, screening themselves from that lethal machinegun for the most part. There were a few tense moments when the MG caught one White section and another was thrown back after attempting to close assault one of the Red sections, but then the gun jammed, I was able to get another section in to launch a brutal close assault on the same Red section, and on the other flank my single flanking section poured some terrifyingly accurate rifle fire into the other Red section, and it was all over.

Here’s the table fairly early in the game, with my Whites in the foreground advancing and Reds visible on the edge of the hamlet.

Advance to Attack!

The one White Blind (the Russian tricolour marker on the far side of the table) is a rifle section I was able to keep on Blinds right until I got them to the hedgeline behind the church, where they unmasked and proceed to slam the Red machinegun in a hail of fire. Units coming off Blinds get bonus dice to fire, which proved devastating.

We’ll hopefully get a chance to do a larger RCW game in the next few weeks, but today’s smaller game was interesting and Nathan was interested in another go at the system sometime in the future. I’ve got another fifteen or so Bolsheviks to get off the painting table sometime soon, which will finally give me enough Red figures that they don’t have to be on the defensive all the time!

Oh, and I also have an inbound order from Copplestone with some shiny new stuff. It won’t be just infantry in our RCW games shortly, let’s just say!

A Russian Plank-Roofed Hut

Inspired by Tony’s plank-roof hut tutorial that I linked to in my recent links of interest post, I sat down with stir sticks and my Xacto knives to do up my own version of his hut.

plankroof1
A Russian-style plank-roof hut, after Tony’s tutorial.

My version is 3 inches across the front, 2 inches deep and about 2.5 inches tall to the top of the chimney.

I’ve also been amusing myself recently with fake fur and fabric dye, searching for good loking long grass. I’ll have to write up my discoveries sometime soon, it’s been… interesting.

The new hut will have it’s final paintjob this weekend, more photos of that when it happens.

Terrain, Fonts and other Links of Interest, 13 April 2012

To celebrate (?) this fine Friday the 13th, another of my occasional posts of links.

Muskie commented on my Youtube scenery videos post to remind me of his fascinating Miniature Painting News Aggregator, which has a neat collection of feeds from all over the place, mostly focused on miniature painting but touching on a number of other hobby elements too. The aggregator apparently started as a private project, and it’s a bit GW-centric for my personal tastes, but it can throw up some neat semi-random content. Well worth a visit, and well worth bookmarking for return visits. (Incidentially, I”ll also recommend Muskie’s Better Hobby Blogging article for those of us who blog. Full of good advice.)

We talk about design, fonts, Inkscape and related topics fairly regularly here on The Warbard, and I’ve just discovered the Lost Type Co-op, a pay-what-you-want font foundry with lots of very nice Art Deco-influenced fonts and others suitable for Interwar/Early 20th C design efforts.

Further on the design and graphics front, Fantastic Maps is, well, fantastic. Jonathan Roberts also has a great collection of Tips & Tutorials that is well worth checking out.

Last but definitely not least, the Barking Irons site has a nicely illustrated Witchlands Hovel tutorial by Tony Harwood. The Witchlands are Flintloque’s version of Russia, and Tony’s article should provide inspiration for plank-roofed rural buildings for Russia and elsewhere.

In fact, I’m going to get off this computer, get some food, then start cutting coffee stir sticks for my own version of a plank-roofed hut!

Scenery and Terrain Vids on Youtube

I don’t spend a lot of time rummaging around on Youtube, so up until recently I’d missed the immense amount of wargaming material there, especially terrain & scenery tutorials. A lot of the model railroad techniques are really too fiddly (or the resulting scenery too fragile) to really work for wargaming, but there’s lots of wargaming terrain vids and some great ones from the model railroaders that’ll work nicely on the wargaming table.

This might be old news to some of you, but I thought I’d link to a couple of good ones I found. Who knows, this might become a semi-regular feature here.

How to make your own clump foliage.

A machine for making bottlebrush trees. These look good and should be solid enough for wargaming.

From the same guy, how to make pine trees, a variation and expansion of his bottlebrush technique. He also has hedges with another variant of the same bottlebrush technique.

Another YouTuber with lots of good video tutorials is RubbishInRubbishOut of Australia. Here’s his useful Making “Goop” for basing wargaming scenery and terrain, basically a mix of caulking, water, glue and sawdust or sand for texture to quickly add ground texture. He’s got a bunch of other good videos too, well worth checking out.

(I’ve avoided embedding the videos in this post quite deliberately. Half a dozen embedded vids can lock up older computers quite nicely, and the embedding always gets broken on Tabletop Gaming New’s blogroll and other RSS feeds anyway. Go watch the vids on YouTube, they’re worth it!)

Pardon Our Outages

We’ve had two outages in the last week here on the Warbard, where our normally-reliable WordPress backend takes a dump and decides to stop working. Given that the entire site (and five others…) run on this WordPress install, that’s a bit of an issue.

I know what the fix is (reinstall the theme used here via FTP, which is easy enough) but this is a classic bandaid solution, because I don’t know why it’s breaking in the first place, as the error message appears to reference a line that doesn’t exist in the file it’s referring to, which is amusing…

I have to say that this morning’s quick repair job on the site (while on my coffee break at work) wouldn’t have been possible without PortableApps – I have both Filezilla Portable and Firefox, Portable Edition on a USB key, so I can securely carry around all the accesses I need for site maintenance without having to install stuff on the machines at work or other random Windows computers!

Anyway, hopefully it won’t happen again. Any WordPress gurus in the audience know what is going on? The WordPress help forums and a general Google search turned up nothing terribly useful…