Category Archives: Terrain

Wargaming terrain & scenery posts.

Historicals, Painting, Terrain, WW2 Naval

The Workbench This Week, 7 January 2026

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A bit of 1/1200 naval action this week, as well as the usual random stuff lurking around the edges of the bench!

Aziz, Light!

Over the holidays I finally got around to something I’ve been wanting to do for several years, install more lighting over my hobby bench. I’ve got a pair of Ikea task lamps on either front corner of the bench each with a big daylight-balanced (4000K or so) bulb in them, and OK overhead lighting, but middle aged eyes need more light so I finally got around to installing a bunch of daylight LED strip lighting. Four feet of it, cut into a pair of two foot strips. Lee Valley has all the stuff to make this pretty easy, if you’re lucky enough to have an LV nearby. Ikea does too but their stuff is pricier and less flexible. The LED tape light is 120 LEDs per meter (30 per foot, nominally) so they give nice dense even task lighting.

LED tape being set up on my kitchen counter. It’s all 12V after the little transformer box in the foreground, so it’s easy and safe to work on if you have very basic electrical skills! Also, very very bright. Very. Would have made Aziz’s job so much easier…

On the Workbench

The new light strips can actually be seen reflected in the gloss varnish on the two harbour pieces below!

The workbench! Details in text, but yes, that’s a sea serpent in the centre.

On the actual workbench, two harbour pieces and a shore battery for 1/1200 boat games. With three coats of gloss varnish the harbour bits are done, and there’s just a bit of detail and cleanup to do on the shore battery.

On the right on painting sticks is a batch of 1/1200 boats a good friend 3d resin printed for me sometime last year, or possibly late 2024. There’s a pair of big Liberty ship freighters, a pair of little coastal freighters, three Tribal class Royal Navy destroyers, and a batch of eight German Siebel ferries – one gun platform version and seven with various vehicle loadouts on the decks. The two round bases are another coastal freighter that I cut in half to make a pair of wreck markers, one of which is blowing up real good as it sinks.

Yes, that is a sea serpent in the middle, a gloriously goofy sculpt from Footsore’s Harrowhyrst line sculpted by the incredibly talented Trish Carden (follow her on BSky, she’s awesome). I’m not sure it’ll ever appear in a naval game, but I might set the serpent up on the edge of the table just to worry the players…

Also some of the usual random clutter, like a base of 28mm chickens and another of ducks tucked in behind the lineup of vessels…

Historicals, Terrain, WW2 Naval

More Boating About In Mess

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Back on the WW2 fast boat thing for a start to 2026! Sometime in mid-2025 over on Bluesky I ran across Thomas Brandsetter’s early draft Torpedoes & Tides system and he was kind enough to send send us the draft rules privately. We only got one game of the system done in 2025 and didn’t really have any playtest notes to send back to Thomas, but I really like the system he’s written, a very clean adaptation of Ganesha Games’ existing Galleys & Galleons rules.

Dog boats trying to stop an E-boat sortie from Le Havre. Another playtest of what is now officially going to be a standalone Ganesha Games ruleset. This is very exciting for me, as GG is one of my favourite rules publishers. #navalwargaming

— Thomas Brandstetter (@thomasbrandstetter.bsky.social) 2025-07-24T15:38:32.661Z

All this inspired me to dust off some long-neglected things and start a couple of new ones. The last full size 1/1200 coastal module I did, back in December 2023, saw me speculating about “maybe a coastal gun battery” and it’s been back of mind ever since, so I got started on that, a simple clifftop battery somewhere along the coast of Occupied Europe inspired by some of the simpler batteries – just two open gun pits and a small cluster of supporting bunkers.

This shoreline piece isn’t designed to pair up with my existing coastline pieces, it’s a standalone corner bit. The gun pits are built up out of sheet styrene, the various bunker roofs are scrap styrene, the cliff is pink styrofoam insulation, and the whole thing is based on my usual 1mm styrene card. The two back sides of the triangular piece are about 4″ long.

Early construction. Styrofoam landform shaped with knife and sandpaper, styrene card for the emplacements.
Clifftop level view of the early construction.
Paint and more construction; the bunkers are all just tiny rectangles of styrene.
More paint and flock. Still want to do some more flock up top, guns in the two emplacements, and a bit more paint on the water.

While I was cutting styrene bases I pulled out the Brigade Models Harbour Walls I’ve had in the Pile of Opportunity since sometime in 2020 and set up a pair of simple harbour walls sticking out to sea, as seen many places along the European coasts. Absolutely nothing fancy, just 1mm styrene and the cast metal Brigade walls. Still in progress, the walls need more paint and the sea will get gloss varnish and waves. The smaller piece with the right-angle breakwater is about 6″ x 3″ and the larger multi-angle harbour is about 7″ x 4″.

Smaller harbour piece.
Larger harbour piece.

There’s also various other things going on, including a whole new batch of ships a friend 3d printed in resin for me over a year ago that I’ve finally primed, but more on those when there’s progress to show off!

Galleries, Painting, Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Six

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The last of this project’s posts until I can show off the painting work in progress photos and all the extra finished photos I didn’t use for the Lead Adventure Forum Build Something Contest 2025!

There was a bunch of pre-priming sanding, puttying and fiddling. The side walls of the fuselage pulled slightly skew during construction somehow, so the side rails that hold the roof panel in place had to be custom-fitted on each side.

The shuttle, complete except for landing gear and roof rails, front quarter view.
Rear view of the shuttle, with some final glueup of one of the rear baffle panels in progress.
Top view, showing the engraved panel lines in the wings nicely.
PRIMER! Here’s the underside, complete except for landing gear, all primered.
Primer, top view, with the already finished, painted, and decaled cargo bay masked off.
Proper supervision is essential to all well run projects. Sophie la Floof spent quite a bit of time on the rug under my project bench making sure things went smoothly.

The landing gear only went on after painting, decals, and weathering were all done, so I don’t have any photos of that to show off yet.

By the time this posts audience voting on Build Something Contest 2025 should have started over on Lead Adventure! Go check out all the great entries! BSC rules say no sharing WIP or finished painted pictures until either the contest is over or you’re eliminated from it, so there will be a bit of a pause in shuttle pix here, but I do have a gallery fully of painting photos to show eventually.

Galleries, Painting, Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Ancillary Stuff…

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If you want something done, give it to a busy person to do is a saying that floats around. It’s often true that when you’re in a certain creative groove, you can spin off other projects much faster than you might otherwise get to them!

That proved the case while I was deep in building the large and complex shuttle/dropship for my Lead Adventure Forum Build Something Contest 2025 entry.

I had extra plastic kits parts around from the 1/72 LeClerc MBT kit I bought to pillage for kitbashing parts, I had some rather cool pieces of offcut styrene around, and I wanted a landing pad to stage photos of the shuttle on, so it all came together in a trio of related projects.

The Drone

This started life with the top of the LeClerc turret, the cap off an Angosturna bitters bottle rescued from the recycle bin, some googly eyes and other bits from the dollar store, and various styrene bits.

The angosGMBH Distraction-class Autonomous Sensor Drone is set up for planetary and space surveying and exploration, with various sensor loadouts depending on mission. No crew space is available, although the tiny cargo/sample bay on the port side could accommodate a human-sized sophont in a space suit for a very short, very uncomfortable ride, if it hasn’t been adapted into a drone bay for auxiliary sub-drones. Some Distraction-class are themselves autonomous intelligent citizen-drones, although most have only limited-ML minds, and some platforms are old-fashioned remotely operated vehicles.

The drone went together in a single evening and was primed and painted the next day. I got zero photos of it in raw styrene.

Drone primed, side/top view.
Primed, underside view.
Primed, rear quarter view.
Paint in progress.
Paint in progress.
Paint finished, no decals or weathering yet.
Side profile with paint finished.

The Distraction-class has since been decaled and weathered; I’ll try to remember to get some proper finished photos of it soon and post them.

The Sensor/Comms Tower

This started with the increasing amount of styrene offcuts piling up around the edges of my workbench. Many of them were too large and too interesting in shape to just throw away, so I started fiddling around while waiting for solvent cement to cure on the shuttle and built this little tower in a couple of evenings.

It’s about 5″ tall to the top of the actual tower. The side profile is the offcuts from the nose skin of the shuttle, the various circles and hexagons are from building the docking port in the roof of the shuttle. The rest of the thing are either random offcuts from shuttle building or just stuff from my raw materials stash.

The tower, front view, bare styrene.
The tower, rear view, in bare styrene.

The Landing Pad

This is from the last big piece of 1/8″ foamed PVC in my stash; I’m going to have to go get more from our local signmaking/plastic supply shop because it’s wonderful to work with. Stronger, cleaner, and easier to cut than foamcore, it can be embossed and engraved easily and cleanly, and it’s less murderous on knives too.

The whole thing is 12 inches by 12 inches, assembled from two 12×6 pieces with some connection strips underneath. It got grey primered, then a messy dampbrush/drybrush combo of various tans and greys over that, followed by a few washes in black, grey, and dark blue. There’s expansion cracks engraved right into the PVC, and after the main paint had dried I did a couple of marking lines with tape and a stippling brush in white and bright yellow-green. (Reaper’s Dungeon Slime paint. Highly recommended if you want an obnoxiously bright hazard warning colour!)

I also did a low wall piece with PVC offcuts. It’s 10″ long and about half an inch high. It got the same paint as the pad, with the top third or so painted white when I did the pavement markings on the pad.

Primed and waiting for paint.
Painted and marking lines done. Nice and simple, just a few minutes work over a couple of days. Painted wall piece off to the right.
The mostly-complete shuttle posing on the finished landing pad.

I’ve got a few final complete primered shuttle photos to show off soon, and after the Build Something Contest rules allow, I have a bunch of painting progress photos to post. The shuttle was a big painting project and painting took most of March and the first week of April!

Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Five

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The long-overdue fifth installment of my Build Something Contest blog posts! This one takes us from the end of Part Four, where we had the start of detail panels, no wings yet, and the cargo bay just primed.

Per BSC rules I can’t share WIP or finished painted photos yet, so there’s still going to be gaps in this build log. I have a bunch of WIP paint photos taken and will share them when the contest has begun.

Feb 22 – the underside gets detail panels.
Feb 22 – underside detail panels, looking aft.
22 Feb – the engine pod assembly begins.
22 Feb – layout of the two wings on 1mm styrene sheet.
22 Feb – engine and wing subassembly taped in place on the fuselage.
22 Feb – wings taped to fuselage.
22 Feb – wings temporarily mounted to fuselage, overhead view.
24 Feb – wings and engine pod details.. Front view, showing the intake grilles.
24 Feb – wing and engine subassembly, rear view with jet/rocket nozzles.
24 Feb – another view of the rear of the engine pods.
2 March – putty work on the engines and wings.
3 March – putty and test fit of roof and wings on the fuselage.
3 March – decal sheets assembled. There are almost three dozen decals in the cargo bay and another twenty or so on the outside of the finished shuttle.
9 March – final test fit of the wing/engine subassemblies
9 March – the wings get the vertical stabilizers added.
9 March – rear ramp view with detail panels on the insides of the rear fuselage extensions.
9 March – the wings finally get glued on! Major construction is finished, on to priming and painting!

Along the way while finishing the shuttle, I built a 12″x12″ landing pad as a photo prop and gaming scenery, a small ‘drone’ using some of the LeClerc MBT parts that hadn’t be used in the shuttle build, and a 6″ tall sensor tower that used up a bunch of the offcut styrene from the shuttle that was too interesting to just throw away. I’ll share photos of them in another post.

Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Four

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Another photo dump of the last ten days or so progress on my Build Something Contest 2025 entry. My LAF project thread is getting much more regular updates (new photos every other day or so at this point) if you want to follow along!

As of the last blog post the nose had been skinned but not much else. Since then I’ve tried several designs for the wings, disliked every single one of them, built and detailed the removable roof for the cargo bay, and started doing detail panels on the nose.

Check the captions of the photos below for more details.

Engine/wing mockup in cardstock. This is the second, smaller, angular wing.
Second wing in place, with the first bigger slab-like wing on the cutting mat. Still not happy with either design, so I left the wings alone to do other stuff for a bit!
One of the wing mockups taped in place alongside the open cargo bay.
The underside, showing the three landing gear bays and the un-skinned belly.
Primer! I’m going to be painting the cargo bay before gluing the rear bulkhead & ramp in place, so it got primed.
Rear ramp deployed, couple of 28mm figures hanging out for scale.
Wider view of the rear bulkhead & ramp with the whole shuttle propped up to about the height it’ll sit on it’s landing gear.
The ceiling of the cargo bay all detailed.
Roof! The start of the removable roof of the cargo bay.
The top of the roof, with the docking port/escape hatch detailed. It’s recessed into the roof.
The roof in place, looking foward toward the nose of the shuttle.
Detail panels in 0.5mm styrene being installed. When installing across a bend like this, much easier to glue one side down, let the solvent glue cure, then do the other side across the bend!
Second detail panel installation, side view.

The belly skin will be installed today, and then I’ll be able to carry the detail panels aft from the nose, down the belly, and around the landing gear bays.

I’ve also (finally) started building the actual landing gear, because I need to set the height of that before I can make some detailing decisions for the underside of the beast.

Then it’ll be back to the engine & wing subassemblies, where I have a third wing planoform I want to try out that I think will work better than attempts 1 and 2!

Galleries, Science Fiction, Terrain

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Three

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Decided to go with the nose next instead of the wings and engines, and as predicted in my last post, it required a lot of mockup work, in two stages.

First, I did an internal frame to establish the basic proportions of the nose and give me a nice solid frame to hang the skin from.

I redid parts of the skin mockup three times, including scrapping round three for part of the sides and going back to round two’s ideas. The advantage of all of the fiddling with cardstock and masking tape, of course, is that I knew what I was doing (mostly) when I switched to 1mm sheet styrene and started the real thing.

I also cut back the outer (top/bottom) corners of the sides where they extended forward, and that was the right call, it made integrating the nose and sides easier.

The hammerhead nose was a spur of the moment idea while planning the first mockup piece and I really like how it’s come together; the hammerhead let me play with the angles and bulk of the nose area more than a more straightforward taper would have.

Mockup for the nose frame.
Nose frame finished in 1mm styrene. I wound up cutting most of the long thin brace on the outer side off, but all the internal bracing gave me a nice solid, trouble-free start to doing the skin.
Finished nose frame. The whole beast is just under 11 inches long, nose to back end, which is perfect.
Closeup of the top left with skin mockups in progress.
Nose skin mockup in progress, figuring out what to do between the hammerheads and the start of the body/sides.
The underside of the nose, mockups in progress.
Finally cutting styrene! The big panel behind the hammerheads has a twist to it, so it got anchored down with elastic bands and left for the plastic cement to cure for a bit.
Styrene skin in place, sanding and puttying cleanup started. There is going to be a LOT of sanding.
Current state of the nose, with putty smeared around a lot of the seams and sanding in progress.

I really like how the whole thing is shaping up, it has a good bulky angular look to it. There’s going to be a round of detail panels over this initial skin, after the endless sanding and puttying is done – some of the seams didn’t come out quite as well fitted as I’d like, so there’s going to be some remediation before detailing can start!

Still to do, in rough order of size/complexity of the subassembly: the engine pods and wings; the roof for the cargo bay; landing gear and landing gear bay doors; skin on the belly.

I’m away this coming long weekend and have some things to get organized before we go away for the long weekend, and as mentioned, the next while is likely to be mostly sanding, so it might be ten days or so before there’s another blog-worthy update to this project!

My Build Something Contest 2025 thread on LAF is here; the rest of the contest has some very cool entries – there’s another couple of shuttles or dropships, some neat magical walking constructs, and a bunch of other cool concepts among the other contestants! Entries just closed on February 8th so everyone who’s in for this year is in!

Science Fiction, Terrain, Tutorials

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle Part 2

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Progress on my Build Something Contest 2025 entry, the small shuttle.

Some of these photos have shown up on my Lead Adventure Forum BSC thread but others are original here. Captions have more details.

Mocking up the sides with light card. I didn’t get a photo but there’s three pieces under each of the big side panels to give strength.
Mockup stage showing the in-progress underside of the shuttle.
Local supervisor hard at work.
Styrene sides cut and installed, with the angular extensions at the back.
Designing the initial panel of the rear bulkhead.
Never enough clamps. Or clothes pins in this case. Adding bulk to the underside of the extension on top of the rear bulkhead.
Rear bulkhead and ramp complete and detailed, outside view.
Rear bulkhead and ramp, inside view.
Rear bulkhead and ramp dry fitted to the body. I won’t be gluing the subassembly in until quite late to make painting the interior easier.
Rear subassembly dry fitted, outside view. There will be small panels in each lower corner to cover the groove the ramp hinge pin rides in, and detail panels on the insides of the fuselage extensions.

Very pleased with progress so far. Up next will be either the engine/wing subassemblies on either side, or the nose, depending on my mood. Both are going to require more cardstock mockups, especially figuring out how the nose is going to join up to the front of the current body assembly…

Terrain

Build Something Competition 2025 – Corey’s Distillery planning

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It’s Build Something Competition on the Lead Adventure Forums again and once again I’m running them, so have been a bit behind on my own entry (unlike Brian, who is racing ahead with construction).

This year’s theme is Vessel or Conveyance, so most are doing movable things like shuttles. Although we have law firms, we do have two alcohol-related entries – my distillery and Tarnegol’s brewed. May the best booze win!

Inspiration and initial thoughts

to start, I did a bunch of Googling to find good images. There’s actually a whole 3D printable stl for a distillery by MiniatureLand on MyMiniFactory, so that was a good place to look for inspiration:

Distilling itself is a product of alchemy, which are basically the same art with different outcomes. And historically, people did a lot of a alchemy, but strangely really only started distilling drinkable alcohol in large quantities in the early Renaissance, right as European alchemists started building on what the Arabic scholars had done. That does mean we get lots of great art about alchemy:

Il laboratorio dell’alchimista by Giovanni Stradano
The Alchemist by David Teniers the Younger
The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers, by Joseph Wright of Derby

And of distilling itself, it really flourished in Renaissance Italy, which happens to be what I’m based on fantasy city on, so happy times. There are lots pieces of art of the key part of distilling: the still (the vessel from the competition theme):

Planning the building

With all those inspiration pieces done, I start the process of figuring out how big I wanted to make the building. I really want to tie it into my planned sewer/basements I’m doing for my city, so that fixes one part of the building: one edge must be 3″ tall for the basement, with the building on top.

With that set, I drew up some simple plans, ultimately deciding on a 6″x9″ building, with big double doors in the long end. The base of the building will be 3D printed, with foam building on top.

Base of the building including the basement.

And thus ends today’s post – with an initial base printing. Onward to actual construction tomorrow

Fantasy, Reviews, Terrain

Dead Animal Bits (in hard plastic)

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Back at the very end of 2023 I happened to find a Kickstarter for a sprue of dead animal bits to make kitbashing and such easier, and I wrote it up in December 2023 here on the blog. It was run by Pete the Wargamer in partnership with Wargames Atlantic, who would do the actual production of the hard plastic sprue.

The campaign funded (just!) which was cool, and I put in for 3 sprues. Molding up an injection molded plastic production run takes time and it was late October 2024 before I got my loot, but communication from Pete was good the whole time.

So what do you get? The sprue is roughly 6″ by 8.5″ and well-supplied with everything from shark jaws to antlers to femurs to hacked-off hands on spikes or hooks! I was mostly interested in the antlers and goat horns, but there’s lots of other neat stuff to accessorize scratchbuilding or kitbashing with!

The front of the Dead Animal Bits sprue. See text for details.
The back of the sprue. See text for details!

Right in the centre of the sprue there’s half a dozen big shark jaws; the top of the sprue has two different style of goat/sheep (demon?) horn each in several sizes, and deer/elk antlers in three sizes. Below the shark’s jaws there’s some feathers (the small things off to the left of the front view), some rib cages, a bunch of severed hands on spikes or hooks, another style of curled goat horn in two different sizes, a few individual shark teeth, and finally a batch of femur-looking bones, again in several sizes.

A closeup – this is the top left of the front of the sprue. Horns, antlers, hands and heads on hooks, and shark teeth here.

If you want to do whole units of antlered or horned troops you’ll likely burn through a bunch of sprues, but if you just want to add general weirdness here and there a set of these sprues should keep you happily adding weirdness for a good long while.

I’ll be adding horns and antlers to a batch of undead infantry I have in progress, and they’ll definitely be showing up in some of the stranger plans for my slow-burn 17th C pike and shot fantasy project, and in the best tradition of being inspired by random stuff that’s now in your Pile of Opportunity, I’m sure they’ll be showing up elsewhere too…

Wargames Atlantic now has the Dead Animal Bits on retail as a box set of three sprues, so if you missed the KS you’re in luck! (they also have some nice detailed photos, too)

Definitely a cool addition to the hard plastic wargaming items available, and I’m glad I was able to help make them happen via the KS.