Tag Archives: inspiration

Links of Interest, 27 January 2020

First links of interest of the new year – and the new decade, come to that!

Dana Howl has a fairly new YouTube channel that I discovered via Twitter. She’s a great antidote to the shouty beardy death metal school of YT videos, being soft spoken and very, very dry humoured. Her favourite video of mine so far is her introduction to using glazing & glaze medium on miniatures, which is a new technique to me. I’ve picked up a small bottle of glaze medium from my local art supply store and while I’ve not used it much yet, it’s another very useful tool in anyone’s painting toolbox. I think it’ll be especially useful on large monsters. I’ve got a huge Reaper Bones dragon that I got in one of their Bones Kickstarters that I should start painting one of these years…

Another recent (to me) find of small scale scenery is over at League of Augsburg, where Jim is building whole chunks of coastal England to sail 1:2400 scale Anglo-Dutch War ships upon. He’s actually using the same Brigade Models small scale buildings I am, and they work just fine in a scale half the size of the one I’m using them in.

I’m currently attempting to paint impossibly tiny 1:1200 coastal warfare boats without going mad or blind, and Mal Wright’s excellent little handbook on Royal Navy WW2 paint jobs British and Commonwealth Warship Camouflage of WW II – Vol I has been incredibly useful. It’s available in ePub (the linked version) and traditional dead-tree from Pen & Sword in the UK; I went for the ePub because I didn’t feel like coughing up for S&H for one book, but I might actual also buy the “real” book at some point. Mr. Wright is apparently currently working on a similar volume for the Americans and Japanese in the WW2 Pacific theatre, which is awesome, and has apparently also done some work toward a German Kreigsmarine counterpart to his Royal Naval series.

More soon, including photos of those impossibly tiny coastal warfare boats!

Links of Interest, 12 December 2019

If you’re interested in terrain building but not sure where to start, or you already craft terrain but want to step your game up, there’s a bunch of great YouTube tutorials out there these days. I’ve linked to Mel the Terrain Tutor before, but Black Magic Craft (YouTube homepage, website) is one I just recently discovered, and on his website he’s got a fantastic list of Essential Equipment with discussion of what he uses each tool or thing for and links to the various incarnations of Amazon to buy the things. Very useful regardless of your experience level.

By way of example, here’s one of Black Magic Craft’s videos on Better Stone Painting with some good stuff on getting your stone to be something other than flat grey, which is a thing I still struggle with after years (decades, gah!) of making terrain! (direct link to video, if the embed decides not to work)

Terrain is the third army, so why is it so neglected? was posted a couple of years ago (2017 sometime) but remains true and is a useful short rant on the importance of what might be my favourite part of this hobby!

Blinky blinky lights! Aircraft-style strobes on models with really simple electronic components, via Instructables. I still want to do some sort of shuttle or dropship for sci-fi gaming, might need to bump it up a notch and add lights now! Hmm, maybe a live lighthouse on the 1/1200 naval terrain I’m doing?

In the “It’s insane, I kind of want one, but storage would be a nightmare” category, Things From The Basement has a 20th Century Train Station that is 45″ (yes, forty-five inches, almost four feet) across! Some other neat stuff too including a batch of Russian buildings and scenery. There’s a fantastic fully painted and decorated version of the train station with lots of photos over on The Demo Gamers. You could run an entire pulp game just in and immediately around this thing…

Finally, from the recent (Nov 2019) Burrows & Badgers Kickstarter, a post with a trio of really nice painting tutorials all in one shot. One on tartan, one for worn leather, and one for leaf-patterned cloaks.

More on the naval gaming front soon, although expect a bit of a blogging break over the Christmas & New Years holidays as I shall mostly be out of town. On the off chance that I don’t actually blog again before leaving town, I hope my readers have excellent holidays. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and so on and so forth!

Savannah Terrain

This is diorama-level scenery building, but almost everything he does in this video is applicable to wargamer-proof terrain too and the final result looks awesome.

Paepercuts is a great channel; he was quiet for a while but has been putting out new stuff regularly now and is well worth the subscription over on YouTube. One of the comments in the Savannah video describes the host of these as “the Bob Ross of scenery videos” and I realized that’s one of the things I like about him, there’s none of the “HEYYYYYYY GUYSSSSSSSSSSS” weird loudness that is apparently standard issue in far too many other YT videos.

As for me and my house, I’m still not doing much gaming-related stuff but I can feel the new-project itch starting up. This might be something completely different, away from the various 28mm projects I’ve spent time on the last five years or so. Possibly Russian Civil War at a grand tactical small scale, 6mm or even 2mm/3mm for that “miles of open steppe” feel… we shall see!

Trumpeter Salute is next month in Vancouver and for the first time in years I’m not running a game but I’m still really looking forward to being there. Trumpeter has been great for blasting the wargaming cobwebs off in past years, we’ll see what it does this time around!

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.

Gallery: Shipyard Photos for Inspiration

Another revival from the old Brian’s Wargame Pages version of the site, and one that I should have brought forward ages ago! You can see the Esquimalt Drydock on Google Maps for a sense of scale that wasn’t available ten years ago when I first posted the photos. — Brian, 22 Feb 2011

In the summer of 2001 I was roommates with a guy who worked in the drydock here in town. He turned into a real asshole after being laid off, but while he was still working he gave me a tour of the yard. I brought my camera, and these pics should inspire people looking for new industrial modern or SF scenery projects!

One thing that would be very difficult to reproduce on the gaming table, except maybe in 6mm, would be the sheer scale of the place. I didn’t have my wide-angle lens with me, so I didn’t even try for some real area photos. The drydock itself is 1100 feet long; the two big cranes pictured below are several hundred feet tall. There were two fair-sized ships in the drydock when I was there, and they could have accomodated a third with no difficulty. And this isn’t even that big a drydock, by maritime engineering standards. The ones that can accomodate nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are even bigger…

Wargamers interested in industrial scenery or future-tech industrial landscapes (Necromunda style) should find plenty of inspiration here! Even if you can’t reproduce the scale, the clutter, details and fixtures should provide some ideas.

Click any image below for a (slightly) larger view. Keep in mind these are refugees from the Old Web, when 600px wide was a Big Image.

1920’s Egypt in colour

A woman sits with her fruits for sale. Photo Credit: Gervais Courtellemont and W. Robert Moore for National Geographic
A woman sits with her fruits for sale. Photo Credit: Gervais Courtellemont and W. Robert Moore for National Geographic

Egypt, much in the news today as it was in the 1920s when these pictures were taken, is the focus of this photo collection: Egypt in the 1920’s in colour (from How to be a Retronaut). in 1919 a major revolution had occurred, which led to a unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922 by the British government, which in turn led to the successive revolutions of 1952 and 2011. Actions begetting actions. Despite that, the Egypt of these pictures appears little changed by the millenia of history that have washed over it.

Once you are done, I suggest you see SatNav c. 1930 and the wonderfully-human Australian criminals of the 1920s. Lastly, have a wander through their entire 20s and 30s sections for glimpses at a past gone.