I’ve been spending some more time on YouTube recently, rummaging around the wargaming-related channels. I don’t have the time or the patience for the long rambling unedited vlog-format stuff, but there’s some good, properly edited, to-the-point stuff out there.
Two channels I particularly like are Kujo Painting, who did the great “How To Paint Tartan” video embedded below. The rest of his collection is well worth looking through.
Miniwargamer Jay also has a good Miniature Painting 101 series of vids with lots of good tips. Again, most of them are fairly short (5 to 20 minutes), cover a single topic, and are well edited.
On non-YouTube notes, a couple more links!
Genet Models, formerly Ebbles Miniatures have been around since the early 2000s turning out really good papercraft science fiction models. The creator of them has more or less retired from the papercraft business (I think he works on computer games now) but he’s put his entire portfolio up for free download. I’ll be adding some of these to our Infinity tables soon, especially some of the shuttles and dropships!
I linked to this awesome tutorial in an earlier post about Infinity ads, but it’s worth linking to again. Want pseudo-holograms on your science fiction scenery? H-Archive does ads and holos is well worth a read. He uses printed transparencies and 1mm clear acrylic sheet to awesome effect; I’m going to have to hit up our local plastic supplier for some 1mm clear acrylic sometime soon!
Doing a bit of cleaning up in my boxes of wargaming supplies I rediscovered a shuttle I built at least ten years ago. It was nominally for 15mm science fiction gaming, but was built without visible windows or any other really obvious scale indicators, and it’s big enough to look like a small craft in 28/32mm SF scenery!
Shuttle retrieved from the box it’s been half-forgotten in for ages. Landing gear next to it; Infinity figure on 25mm base for scale. Click for larger, as usual.
It’s suffered some damage in storage; one of the stabilizer fins is missing and the landing gear was loose and damaged. Rather than fix it up I figured I’d run with it as a damaged crashlanded shuttle that’s suffered a hard landing but is still basically intact. I added some more damage with a file, then chopped part of the underside away so it would sit slightly nose-down.
Hole in the nose. The original shape was a mouthwash bottle built up with styrene plastic sheet and putty. Click for larger.
I used hot glue to stick the shuttle down to the base, then packed the gap between the ground and the shuttle with a few bits of scrap card, slices of foam from a miniatures blister, and a lot more hot glue.
Shuttle with foam and scraps packed into the gap between the body and the ground. Click for larger.
Other side of the shuttle, also showing the missing tail fin and the extra damage I scratched into it. Click for larger.
Finally I put a layer of white glue over the foam and base then dumped sand over it. It might need another layer of sand to touch everything up; we’ll see in a day or two once everything dries!
Sand in place; Infinity Daylami on 25mm base for scale. Click for larger.
More soon once I get the base painted up and touch up the damaged parts of the shuttle!
I mentioned in the last post that I’ve been working on a third large hill, with a roughly 12″x15″ footprint, that being the maximum interior size of a banker’s box. This one is a more complex outline than the previous two and was a fair bit more work to assemble, as I wound up using a lot of smaller pieces of styrofoam to piece the hill together.
Most recent hill in progress, missing the top couple of layers of foam. Infinity Daylami on 25mm base for scale. Click for larger.
The “gully” up the centre of this hill is designed to allow 40mm wide based figures – many of the mid-sized or larger Infinity figures – to access it. There are a number of other areas on this hill that will allow 25mm based figures to stand and access.
Construction finished. 40mm base in the centre, 25mm base to the right, and a 25mm-based figure in the foreground. Click for larger.
Sloped end of the latest hill, with Daylami on a 25mm base for scale. Click for larger.
The sloped end of this hill still needs to be sanded, then I need to mix up a new batch of glue/sand/paint/plaster “goop” to texture the thing before proceeding with painting and flocking.
I’m not planning any more hills this large right now, but I do want to do a group of smaller hills, including some half hills that are explicitly designed to go against the edges of the table to help break up the long lines of sight that can happen on the sides or back edges of too many tables.
I’ve finished the first two hills I started a while back, and built a third large hill to finish up the set for now.
After the first coat of glue/sand/paint “goop” dried I added a second layer to a few areas of both hills, just to smooth out a few seams and such.
After the second coat of “goop”. Click for larger, as usual.
I mentioned in the first hill post that I was piecing these hills together out of pieces of styrofoam instead of using solid sheets for every single layer, to stretch my current supply of the stuff just that little bit further. Here’s what the underside of the two hills looks like:
Underside of the two hills, showing layers and pieces of styrofoam. Click for larger.
Before I started painting, here’s what the two hills and the smaller cork piece looked like.
All three initial pieces together, with an Infinity figure on a 25mm wide base for scale. Click for larger.
Painting
Painting these was pretty straightforward. I started with a flat black basecoat, to thoroughly hide any hints of pink styrofoam that managed to peek through the texture goop layer(s).
Black basecoat done and drying. Click for larger.
The earth areas got a heavy brown drybrushing, then a sloppy wash of thin brown paint, and finally a drybrush of brown mixed with a bit of white.
Brown done on the earth sections. Click for larger.
After that I did a couple of layers of grey drybrush on the rock areas; the initial drybrush was grey mixed with a bit of black, then straight grey, and finally grey mixed with a good dollop of white. The final drybrush mostly got applied on the upper edges of the rocks and on protruding corners and such.
Grey drybrushing done. Click for larger.
Grey drybrushing done. Click for larger.
Finally I flocked random areas of the earth parts, let everything dry, and called it all done!
Smaller cork piece with flocking and Daylami on 25mm base for scale. Click for larger.
Larger hills all flocked and finished. Click for larger.
I’ve started making a third large hill, and I’ll get photos of that up in the next day or so!
Still quiet around here this summer, but wargaming has been taking place, as has figure painting, and finally, just for a change, a bit of scenery building!
I broke out my stockpile of half-inch insulation board last week and spent and couple of hours with a razor knife, hot glue gun, and the styrofoam. I wanted a pair of relatively large hills that were tall enough and complex enough to make for an interesting game of Infinity, a game that tends to be very demanding of cover and alive to the tactical possibilities of good, complex scenery.
Each hill is roughly 15″ long, 12″ wide, and about 4 or 5″ tall. The footprint means they’ll fit in a banker’s box, my standard unit of terrain storage and transport, and the height means they’ll provide total cover to even the biggest units in an Infinity game.
Basic construction finished, with standard sized CD for scale.
To save on foam I cut the bottom layer or two of each hill as a ring instead of a solid slab of foam, and quite a lot of the upper sections of each hill are pieced together from random sized foam chunks.
As a base layer before painting, I mixed a “goop” of white glue, fine sand, and paint and slathered it on with a small housepainting brush that was already beat to heck.
With “goop” on as a base layer to protect and strengthen the foam.
The goop layer isn’t quite dry, it’s going to need about 24 hours to dry out entirely before I proceed with the final painting.
The hills with a trio of Infinity figures on 25mm wide bases for scale.
The third piece of scenery in the photos is a small hill/rocky area I made years ago from a half inch thick cork kitchen hot mat. I was never happy with the colour and flocking I’d put on it, so it got covered in leftover texture goop as well and will be re-finished in the same style as the two new big hills.
Now the next question: go with a conventional Earth-like paint and flock covering, with grey rocks, brown earth, and green foliage, or go with a stark foliage-free moon- or asteroid-like look? Decisions, decisions…
My girlfriend is out of town with friends so I’ve had a bachelor/wargamer weekend and gotten a lot done on my Infinity figures.
The workbench – planters in the foreground, various Haqqislam figures behind, and the usual clutter around the edges! Click for larger.
The planters are foamed PVC sheet and mat board offcuts, and the trees are from Games Workshop — at one point they produced a rather nice set of modular plastic “tropical trees” that vaguely resemble palm trees and are a lot of fun to put together. Like pretty much everything that GW ever does that’s actually interesting, these seem to have vanished from their website, which is a shame. I picked up most of a set a while ago when I bought a whole mixed batch of wargaming stuff off someone locally who was having to downsize.
Closeup of the planters – done with the old GW palm trees – and CB Haqq figures in progress. Click for larger, as usual.
Closeup of the figures and planters. The dark blue figures in the background are various Hassassin Bahram soldiers including three of the infamous Fiday assassins. The figures closer to the camera include a pair of Remotes on the left, an al’Hawwa sniper and al’Hawwa hacker, a pair of Hafza infantry in lower left, and a quintet of Djanzaban medium infantry on the right – two rifles, a sniper, an HMG, and a hacker, all stalwarts of the Qapu Khalqi sectorial force in Haqq.
Having moved at the start of this year I’ve been sorting and reorganizing gaming stuff, as one does, and working on actually using some of the stockpile of stuff I’ve accumulated.
Part of the stockpile was a much wider array of greenery and model plant type material than I had thought I had. I also had a batch of sci-fi planters I had started back in January 2015, painted, and used a lot during Infinity games without ever putting greenery in.
A few minutes with the hot glue gun has finally fixed that!
Shrubbery in progress. Click for larger, see text for details!
The little trees are from Woodland Scenics; I won them as a door prize at Trumpeter Salute a couple of weeks ago. Most of the bushes are just various shades of green foliage foam also from Woodland Scenics, while the spiky looking blueish bushes are actually furnace filter material, spraypainted green, and with fine ground foliage foam sprinkled onto them. Many years ago (like, in the early 1990s…) we had a family model train layout and our background trees were made from furnace filter. The stuff I’m using is from a bag of the surviving, salvaged railroad trees, finally back in service after a couple of decades off!
Completed shrubbery, with Infinity Hassassin Bahram figures observing. Click for larger, as usual.
Looking forward to getting these onto our Infinity tables; Infinity has a bunch of cool terrain rules that are often ignored but can really make the game more interesting.
One of the goals with the spacestation terrain set was to make the whole thing look like not just a collection of tactically interesting obstacles but also a (relatively) sensible, lived-in/working facility. Right now the non-cargo bay area is a bit plain, really just the Impudent Mortal walls in my collection arranged in various ways. I did up some lockers recently to add colour and interesting cover, and now I’ve found a really simple way to do food booths or other fairly small terrain pieces.
Rough cutting guide for one booth. See text for details, and click for larger.
Start with a strip of card 3″ wide and at least 11″ long, or multiple 3″ wide pieces making up roughly the same length. I use 1/16″ mattboard, the stuff used by picture framers, but for this project you could use just about anything. There’s only one measurement in the whole thing that depends on the thickness of the material being used (the height of the front wall of the booth) and that’s easily adjustable or even avoidable if you tweak the design a bit.
You’re cutting as follows:
1″ wide for the under-floor brace/foot. Cut this piece in half again.
1 1/2″ floor
1 1/2″ roof
1 3/4″ back wall
1 9/16″ front wall (NOTE)
2″ end wall
2″ end wall
One booth’s worth of pieces. See text for details, and click for larger.
Start by gluing the two foot pieces to the underside of the floor. Centre it under the floor — exact placement isn’t important, they just exist to lift the front edge of the booth above ground level and add a bit of visual interest. Note that in the layout photo below, I forgot to allow for the foot pieces, as I’m using that scrap of 1/8″ foamed PVC plastic above the card strip instead.
While that dries a bit, cut the two end walls some more to make them interesting. They stand vertically, and you can see from the photos that I’ve cut each in a different way to add variety and provide support for the booth’s large overhead sign(s). You don’t need to get fancy, just a couple of angled cuts can do nicely, especially if you re-use the offcut pieces again as I’ve done on several of the roofs in my set.
Glue the back wall to the back of the floor, with the bottom edge of it resting on the ground. Use the end walls to make sure the back wall is vertical and square, then glue them on, again with the bottom edges resting on the ground.
Floor on it’s foot and back wall in place, side walls cut. See text for details, and click for larger.
Fit the front wall in between the end walls, again making sure it’s square and vertical. Exact placement isn’t important and will depend on how you intend to detail the front wall. I’ve recessed all my front walls and used various offcuts of card to add a few bits of detail. I figure these are automated booths using various machinery to process FoodGoop9000 (or possibly Soylent Green…) into various forms of fast “food” by adding flavour, so there’s no order window or anything specific on the thing.
Basic assembly done, front wall and roof in place. See text for details, and click for larger.
I’ll probably eventually do some graphics to add to the fronts and signs of these booths, including various fast food brands we all know and love like Ariadna Fried Chickenoid and such! They’ll get posted here to the blog when they happen!
Details on front wall and inside the sign supports on the roof, first layer of the sign in front. See text for details, and click for larger.
Glue the roof on last, and put the resulting box aside for the glue to dry a bit. Time to move on to the overhead sign.
This could be as simple as a single strip of the same 3″ wide card you’ve used for the rest of the thing, or any number of more elaborate constructions. If you want a really, really striking sign, there’s H-Archive’s awesome how-to on making “holographic” displays, which I want to follow myself sometime soon!
Extra layers of the sign being held while the glue dries a bit. See text for details, and click for larger.
The curved sign is simply three layers of light card (65lbs, I think it is) cut 1″ high and 3 1/8″ long, just slightly longer than the gap between the vertical bits of the end walls, so that it curves. I glued one strip in place, let it cure for a bit, then gently pushed the second and third strips into place and held them with clothspins until the glue dried. Pre-curving the strips by running them over the edge of my workbench helps.
All three autobooth designs together, with various Hassassin Bahram troopers posing for scale. Click for larger.
The grid on the roofs of my booths is some sort of embroidery/craft mesh stuff that I got a leftover chunk of from my girlfriend. It adds interesting texture if you can get some, or something similar like the plastic mesh used in window and door screens.
The Manned Booth
The fourth and final booth is a variant design that is actually run by a person (or humanoid robot, you never know in Infinity) with a door in one end wall and an open order window/bar in one side wall.
Manned booth assembled, roof off. Click for larger.
Design is identical to the autobooths above except I cut two of the “back walls” and instead of cutting the roof 1.5″ I cut it 1 5/8ths” wide so it would go over the top edges of the walls properly.
Manned booth, roof on. Click for larger.
The inside is outfitted with various bits of card for the bar counter, a side bar/prep table, and a whole bunch of cupboards along the walls.
The outside end walls will eventually be painted and decorated to look like drinks glasses, and there will be a sign of some sort on the roof, although of slightly different design than the autobooths because this roof actually comes off.
Any comments or suggestions please leave them below, I do read and reply to comments but due to the spam filters it might be a while before I approve your comment!
Finally have all six of the big space station wall sections basically complete and primed. All the doors are installed (several sections have sliding doors), the basic layer of surface detail is down, and one side of each is primed dark grey and the other is white.
I’ll gradually add more coloured graphics like the corner piece has, both warning and info labels and ads. There’s also going to be more paint colour on various bits eventually, but for now white and grey is enough.
The control room module has ladders on either side from Warsenal, which they listed and sold separately as recently as late last year but don’t seem to have listed for separate sale anymore. Pity, because they’re nice little lasercut acrylic pieces and dress up the control room nicely – much easier than attempting to make my own damn ladders!
I’m really please with the new corner piece. It can be used both as a corner, as in two of the photos above, and as an angled offset to create more LOS breaks in long runs of the wall modules. It’s also the same footprint (3″x3″) as the elevator tower I’ve built for this set, so the two of them can offset each other. Fewer odd little gaps in the wall setups!
The only major pieces left to do are one or two more regular corner modules and a few more pillar pieces, but with major work done on the full set of big modules I can get to the extra bits and details in a slightly more relaxed way!
Got my in-progress space station setup for Infinity games out on the table today, as one of two tables set up for a very small (four players!) local Infinity tournament.
Space station setup first outing at Everything Games. Click for larger.
Space station setup from a different corner. Click for larger.
It was well received and the other folks had some good ideas for finishing it – breaking up the line of sight down the access tunnels and making it clearer where the ladders are, for example, as well as an idea for a smaller module to offset some of the lines and make it less strongly linear, which I might incorporate.
I’ve got some grey felt that I’m probably going to cut a 4’x4′ mat out of, and I want to do a whole lot more painting and surface detailing of the big hangar wall modules. Need to get more grey spraypaint first, as my current can ran dry while I was putting a base coat on these pieces last night!
