Having assembled my new Sarrisa Precision lasercut buildings, it was time to consider adding some extra details to really make these buildings “pop” and bring them to life. One of the things I wanted to do was add detail to the fronts of the buildings, especially the cornices at the roofline, which are often quite elaborate on brick or stone urban buildings built in the late 19th or early 20th Century.
As I’d assembled these buildings I’d reflexively kept the bits of MDF from inside the windows and other openings in the models, and looking at the little pile of lasercut leftovers, I realized they’d be perfect for basic detailing and adding some relief to the fronts of my new buildings.
The three-storey Sarissa Precision building, and the sorted offcut bits of MDF. Click for larger, as usual.
There were more than enough bits and pieces to do the fronts of five of the seven buildings, with leftovers to keep going on the remaining two if I decide, although I’d like to use some light card in layers for a slightly different look on the last CityBlock building and the Gaslamp Alley townhouse.
Here’s all six of the CityBlock buildings stacked up, five of them with basic ornamentation added with “scrap” MDF.
All six CityBlock buildings stacked up, five of them with front details added. The statue is roughly 28mm tall, just for scale. Click for larger.
Next step is chimmneys and other rooftop detail. I’ll use basswood and plastic tubing for chimmneys, and create roof hatches, vents and roofwalks from basswood and card. Masking tape for tarpaper or paint and fine gravel will complete the roofs, then there’s painting to be done!
In my last post (two+ weeks ago!) I mentioned I’d bought a bundle of Sarissa Precision’s lasercut 28mm CityBlock buildings to bring our pulp gaming into an urban realm. I’ve finally got all seven buildings assembled; here they are on the counter.
All seven Sarissa Precision 28mm lasercut buildings. Click for larger, as usual.
The six similar buildings are from Sarissa’s CityBlock bundle, with one extra floor purchased to give me five two-storey buildings and one three-storey building. The seventh building is the Narrow Townhouse from Sarissa’s Gaslamp Alley Victoria SF line.
The CityBlock buildings go together quickly and easily; the walls and floors are 3mm MDF, and the window frames are seperate sheets of 2mm MDF designed to slot in behind the walls. The first several buildings I put together with more enthusiasm than consideration and glued the windows in right away; for the ones I’ve finished more recently have had the windows left out for now to make them easier to paint.
The floors and roof all come apart to allow access to the interiors of the buildings during games, and the simple tab-and-slot system should survive many games with no issues. The buildings all feel very solid once assembled.
The Narrow Townhouse from the Gaslamp Alley range is one of Sarissa’s most recent releases, and there’s a number of tweaks, refinements, and added details compared to the older CityBlock buildings. The interior floors have wood planking engraved on them, some of the etched and cut detail is a bit finer, and instead of 3mm & 2mm MDF, the Gaslamp buildings use 2mm MDF and laser-cut light cardstock, called “greyboard” on Sarissa’s website. This makes the Gaslamp buildings lighter than the CityBlock ones (although just as solid) and somewhat more detailed. The windows have both inner and outer frames lasercut from cardstock, for example.
Having assembled the basic buildings, I’m now turning toward detailing them before painting. I want to add some details and bits on the front facades and cornices of the buildings, and to the roofs. I’ll use fine modelling gravel on some roofs for a tar-and-gravel roof, and narrow masking tape on others for tarpaper roofs, and add details like chimmneys, roof walks and possibly even rooftop signs.
After that it’ll be time for paint. The engraving on the CityBlock walls is too large to “realistically” be brick, but I’ll likely paint several of them up in traditional red bricks anyway, as well as some as stone.
Detailing photos and writeup in the next couple of days!
Got a nice box from J&M Miniatures earlier this week, and even before I cut the tape on the box I could smell the future… oddly enough, the future (of wargaming scenery) smells like scorched MDF. Laser-scorched MDF.
Specifically, a whole whack of 4Ground’s wagons. Corey had ordered approximately enough wagons to provide logistics for an invasion of Russia (well, OK, six…), which he might get around to showing off here at some point, and I’d tagged a single extra General Purpose wagon onto his order. I’ve previously reviewed 4Ground’s Generic Horse Cart, so it was nice to get my paws on the cart’s larger relative, the GP Wagon.
In the ziplock, you get a single 8″x5.25″ sheet of 3mm MDF full of laser-cut wagon parts and a single double-sided sheet of illustrated instructions. That and a dab or three of white glue are all you need to turn out a very nice wagon.
4Ground’s General Purpose wagon, still in MDF sheet form.Wagon mostly finished, upside down so I can get the wheels in place.
The GP Wagon is a bit more involved than the Horse Cart, but everything is very precisely cut and well engineered. I’ve built injection moulded plastic kits that fit a LOT less precisely than this MDF wagon does! The only time I found the photograph-illustrated instructions less than clear was when beginning assembly of the front axle/steering assembly, but a bit of dry fitting reveals that the pieces really only go together one way, which makes it hard to really screw up.
Finished, with the wagon pole pivoted vertical and a 28mm Copplestone Bolshevik militiaman for scale.
You have the option of adding canopy hoops over the bed of the wagon for the classic covered wagon look, but I elected to leave them off this one. The next will probably have hoops, just because! The finished wagon is just over 3″ long (6″ including the pole), about 1.75″ wide across the hubs, and about 1.5″ tall. You can fit three figures on 20mm bases into the back, two if you use oversized 1″ bases. I’ll probably paint both this one and the Horse Cart eventually, but even in bare MDF they look pretty good, with the dark laser-burned cut marks providing nice contrast to the normal honey-brown MDF.
Phil of Slug Industries (and Adventures in Wargaming, his personal blog) has recently released a set of 28mm pulp luggage. Cast in resin, you get six steamer trunks, four suitcases and three hatboxes, a nice selection to dress up any pulpish scene, provide objectives for your skulking players to try to locate, or just provide cover on a dock or train station platform!
This plethora of options is especially broad when you decide, as I did, to order three full sets of this luggage! Counting the three miscasts Phil threw into my order, I now have 42 individual pieces of baggage. Douglas Adams would have approved of this number, and so do I.
Thirteen pieces of baggage from 6mmPhil/Slug Industries. Scale provided by a Copplestone Bolshevik on the left and a Pulp Figures US Navy sailor on the right. The grid on the cutting mat is half-inch. Click for larger.
The baggage pieces are all cleanly cast in a light grey resin, and I didn’t see a single air bubble or miscast on my sets. The largest of the steamer trunks is just over waist high on a 28mm figure; the smallest hat box just slightly bigger than a typical 28mm figure’s head. Most of the flash rubbed off with my thumbnail; a couple of the smaller pieces had a bit of more solid flash around the bottom edge that needed a moment’s work with knife and sandpaper to deal with. Even two of the three “miscasts” I got with my order are perfectly usable, with just a bubble or two around the handles on the sides marking them as “miscasts” – I’ve paid full price for resin pieces with bigger casting flaws in the past!
The largest of the steamer trunks is 1.5″ long, 7/8″ wide and 3/4″ tall (37mm x 23mm x20mm); the smallest trunk on the far right of the photo above is 5/8″ x 1/2″ x 7/16″ (16mm x 12mm x 12mm).
I’m busy getting ready for the Trumpeter Salute convention in two weeks and contemplating a run at LAF’s Lead Painter’s League 7 which starts just after that, so I can’t promise I’ll have painted examples of this baggage to show off terribly soon, but I will get some of it done after Trumpeter and post pictures here. It should be fun to paint, the details are nice and crisp. Metal steamer trunks can come in a wide variety of colours, and battered, worn leather for most of the suitcases is also easy and fun to paint.
I should add, in closing, that Phil doesn’t currently have the luggage listed on his Slug Industries website, but purchase details can be found at this thread on LAF’s Bazaar forum. Everyone needs more baggage to haul around!
Exactly seven days after I ordered some Orthodox crosses and a few other laser-cut bits from Archeotech, a small padded envelope arrived from the UK. Tucked into a pipe-tobacco tin were 20 of the Orthodox crosses and a pair of small rowboat kits. Amusingly, the tin still smells strongly of pipe tobacco, which combines with the faint burnt-wood smell common to laser-cut MDF in an odd but not unpleasant way.
Orthodox crosses and such from Archeotech. Click for larger, as usual
Andy of Archeotech designed them in pairs out of 1mm MDF, so you glue them back-to-back to get a squarer, cleaner edge than you’d get with a single piece of 2mm MDF. This means that you get a mixed batch of fronts and backs. It’s fairly obvious which is the front and which the back with the MDF Andy uses; one side is noticeably shinier and smoother than the other.
I’ve assembled two of the crosses already, and tacked one of them onto a penny just to get it upright. Scale is provided by a Pulp Figures 28mm U.S. Navy gunboat sailor, also on a penny base.
The other part of my small Archeotech order was a pair of their little rowboat kits. The laser-cut 1mm MDF bits here provide the frame and detail bits (oars and oarlocks) for a small 2″ long rowboat; you provide a strip of light card or heavy paper about 7mm wide for the sides of the boat, as detailed in the well-illustrated instructions on Archeotech’s website. This isn’t a serious figure-carrying vessel, more a small detail piece to appear alongside a dock or as a tender, to provide nautical flavour. It’s a well-designed little kit, though, and the basic idea could easily be scaled up to make a small launch or powerboat that was capable of carrying three or four 28mm figures on small bases.
As I mentioned in my first “Frickin’ Lasers” post, Archeotech is set up to do custom/semi-custom lasercutting specifically for wargamers, and to work with wargamers on designs. I’ve certainly got some things I’ll be approaching Andy about in the future!
I’ve been housesitting a relative’s place since last week, which explains the lack of posts here, but we (my brother and I) have also taken advantage of access to working space to crank out a project we’ve talked about for several years – a good, big gaming mat!
I’ve done hills, trees, buildings and all sorts of scenery bits, but they’ve always been put on top of borrowed mats, a lot of which clashed with the scenery we’d built. The base is a 6 foot by nine foot canvas painter’s dropcloth from Home Depot; we then used latex caulking tinted with brown paint and scraped on thin, then dumped generous amounts of mixed Woodland Scenics flocking on top of that and pressed it down gently.
After the caulking dries (overnight), we shook the loose flock off and gathered it for re-use. The surviving flock seems pretty solidly attached, although we’re looking into some sort of fixative to solidify it. Spray adhesive or cheap, scent-free hairspray have been suggested; some experimentation might be in order. In the meantime, the mat is usable as-is!
I’ll do a proper tutorial-style posting when I’m home and on my own computer, but here’s two photos of the beast! The figure is a 28mm Artizan pulp heroine, chosen for her red dress so she stands out at least a bit on the huge green expanse!
Most of a six by nine flocked gaming mat, drying on the garage floor. The tiny fleck at the centre of the photo is a 28mm figure!
Over on Lead Adventure, in a thread about some nifty laser-cut bits someone had commissioned, I randomly commented that I wanted a dozen or so Orthodox crosses for Russian scenery, didn’t think they’d be strong enough if built from bits, but couldn’t see commissioning laser-cut ones because, well, I only wanted a dozen or so.
Whereupon Andy Slater (best known as the administrator of the long-lived and fantastic TerraGenesis wargaming terrain site) contacted me; turns out he has started up a small-run bespoke lasercutting service for wargamers. If he could sell them afterward on his site, was I interested in my dozen or so Orthodox crosses?
You see more and more laser-cut terrain everytime you turn around these days, lots of it very nice indeed, but I’d honestly never considered commissioning short-run custom pieces. Andy has, though, and has set up a small laser-cutting operation with exactly that aim.
I now have a batch of laser-cut MDF Orthodox crosses (and a few other bits from Andy’s store) making their way across the world to me. You can see Andy’s photo of the crosses already, and as soon as mine arrive (probably in a week or less, the Royal Mail->Canada Post pipeline is fairly efficient) I’ll post up my own photo and finally start a few Russian cemetery pieces to go along with last year’s onion-domed church.
This is not a new project, just something I remembered while waiting for glue to dry on my current scenery and decided to revisit.
In September of 2009 I sat down with a bit of Milliput and some scrap wood and created the following lectern, upon which resides a Tome of Madness, filled with eldritch verses of great power and bound in the red leathery hide of captured demons. Or something like that, anyway. It was a birthday gift for my brother as he was busy painting a group of cultist figures from Pulp Figures. That pre-dates the current version of this website, so it never got featured here, although I did show it off over on the Lead Adventure Forum. Enjoy!
Having done hedgerows and fields, I wanted some rougher, more overgrown terrain, and I also wanted to start experimenting with tree creation, as trees are the one thing I’ve been lacking in my scenery so far.
I started with the last reasonable-sized offcuts of the 3mm plastic I used as the base for the fields. The rock walls are decorator’s gravel and Gorilla Glue. I mentioned Gorilla Glue briefly in the article on fields, but briefly it’s a thick glue (the colour and consistency of honey) that activates with water, and expands as it dries, foaming outward. I wet the surface of the plastic card with a damp paintbrush, ran a bead of Gorilla Glue were I wanted the wall, dumped gravel in roughly the formation I wanted, then sprayed the whole thing liberally with plain water. The expanding Gorilla Glue will fill some of the gaps between the pieces of gravel, and also fill out the bulk of the wall slightly. After it dries (a couple of hours) you can always run a second bead of glue across the top of the wall and dump more gravel on. Two layers of gravel like this will get a wall up to just over waist high on a 28mm figure, which is enough for my purposes.
The three straight rock walls are based on tongue depressors, so 6″ long and about 3/4″ wide. The three small fields/garden bits are old credit card sized gift cards I had lying around, with the raised beds and plow furrows done with hot glue. The larger pieces are all from the 3mm plastic card offcuts, the longest being about 8″ long, the triangular piece about 4-5″ a side.
Gravel and Gorilla Glue for rock walls. Click for larger.
The trees are fairly heavy wire (sold in local hardware stores as “utility wire”, I seem to recall) bent and folded with pliers, then glued down with hot glue. Once they’re secured, I used more hot glue to bulk out the trunk and major branches. Everything – ground and trees – got slathered in white glue and had sand dumped over it at this point.
Rock walls done, on to tree trunks, then sand over everything. Click for larger.
After the sand had dried overnight, everything was basecoated with dark brown paint, mixed randomly with a bit of black paint. The rock walls got straight black as a basecoat. All my basecoats also have a healthy dose of white glue mixed right on each piece to secure the sand and gravel.
Basecoat – brown over everything but the rocks, which get black. Click for larger.
Last bit of painting is a pale brown/tan drybrush over the dirt and trees, dark grey then pale grey/white over the rocks, and finally a pale grey/tan/white mix drybrushed on the tree trunks so they’re a slightly different colour from the ground.
Drybrushing done – light brown & tan on the dirt parts, dark grey & pale grey (almost white) on the rocks, final grey/tan drybrush of the tree trunks.
In Part Two, flocking, scenic foam and other scatter on the ground, lichen for bushes, shrubs and tree foliage. Coming soon!
As part of an order that arrived this week from Brigade Games I picked up one of 4Ground’s neat looking laser-cut carts. This one is “28-CAW-303 C19th C Horse Drawn Utility Cart”, known on 4Ground’s own site simply as “Horse Cart”! I’ve been meaning to get some of these 4Ground carts & wagons for ages, as carts and wagons are nearly universal scenery and the pewter & resin ones out there tend to go for larger sums than I usually want to spend on waht i
It comes as a 8’x3′ sheet of 2mm MDF, laser-engraved on both sides, with the parts laser-cut except for very tiny sprues holding them into the sheet. There’s an A4 sheet that is both package label and (black and white) instruction sheet. The instructions are all photo illustrated, over a dozen small but clear B&W photos taking you through the assembly.
Straight from the ziplock bag- instructions at top, cart on it’s MDF sheet below. Bag topper card in the middle, just because. Click for Larger.
The parts are all marked by clearly engraved letters on the sheet, and the photos and text are more than clear enough to take you through the step-by-step assembly. I should note that there is a typo in the last sentence of the written instructions, though, where the letters identifying two parts are duplicated. The photos are clear enough, and by that point you’re down to so few parts it’s reasonably obvious where things are supposed to slot in.
Finished, with a 28mm Copplestone caveman for scale. Click for Larger.
The finished cart is actually fairly substantial. The body is about 2″ long and 1.5″ wide; the whole cart from tailgate to front of the arms that hold the draft horse is 3.5″ long, 2″ wide across the wheel hubs and 1″ high when sitting level. Resting forward on the arms (what are these pieces actually called? I’m sure they have a name in a real cart…) the back end of the cart is about 1.25″ tall.
Front & side views of the cart. Click for Larger.
I’ve not yet decided how I’m going to, or even if I’m going to, paint this up. I think I’ll experiment this weekend on the offcut pieces of MDF and see how it reacts to washes and other paint. A grey wash and a bit of off-white drybrush might be all it needs to weather the wood a bit and give it a well-used appearance.
