Quick photo of my work-in-progress Renedra gravestones, purchased over Christmas from J&M Miniatures. The bases are leftovers from my long-neglected English Civil War/Thirty Years War forces, which are Warlord sets and come to think of it, also cast by Renedra.
Quick and rough late night snapshot of half the Renedra graves. Click for slightly larger.
This is half (one of two identical sprues) of the Renedra gravestone set, and spread out to allow figures between the bases, it comfortably fills my 11″x9″ cutting matt. Adding the second sprue and some other bits like trees and such would give you an extensive graveyard to skulk in!
… is 40-some hours before a convention starts, right?
No?
Fortunately, this is actually a small and achievable project. Earlier this evening I declared “major painting operations” done on the bulk of my latest Russian Civil War figures, except the last two figures of the gun crew, which will need an hour or so of attention tomorrow. Needing a distraction from fiddling with figures, I broke out a couple of offcut pieces of pink 1″ styrofoam, nabbed a serrated knife from the kitchen, and started a new hill.
New hill carved, sanded, covered in sand, and basecoated. Click for larger, as usual.
Sizing the hill to space remaining in my Russian terrain box, I wound up with a roughly 10″ long by 7″ wide hill, with a dirt road climbing up and over it. The road fits with my existing caulk roads. There’s three scrap pieces of styrofoam as the structure, pinned together with snapped off toothpicks and glued with hot glue. I used Milliput to fill the gaps on the top surface of the hill and to add some detail to the banks on either side of the road.
While the Milliput was still tacky I dumped sand over the road and a few other patches of the hill, let that dry an hour or so, and slopped on the brown basecoat you can see above. As usual, there was a generous portion of white glue mixed into the paint.
Milliput is apparently able to dry underwater, so I don’t see a layer of wet paint & glue as a major impediment. If I wake up in the morning and the stuff is still tacky, I’ll have guessed wrong, I suppose…
As a break from painting up Russians, last night I broke out the scenery supplies and started in on a new set of plowed field pieces. I like fields of various sorts, they provide interesting texture on the table while being easy to make and easy to transport, being largely flat!
These six are based on the last large piece I have of white 3mm thick plastic. It was salvage from the workshop of a non-profit I occasionally volunteer at, and I have no idea what sort of plastic it is, but it won’t glue with regular solvent cement and not even superglue holds it gracefully, so it’s useless for buildings. Hot glue and white glue will stick to it, though, and being plastic and relatively thick it won’t warp, so we’ve used most of it up as scenery bases of various sorts. The double handful of small scrap pieces (none much bigger than 4″ in any dimension) are being saved to appear under various small bits of filler and detail scenery in the future, but these six 6″x4″ fields are from the last 12″x12″ piece I had left.
Six new 6″x4″ fields, with the plow furrows made from lines of hot glue. Top right is one of my Gorilla Glue experiments – see text. Click for larger image.
For the plowed ridges and furrows in the fields, I broke out my trusty hot glue gun and ran thin lines of hot glue for the plow ridges. A couple of the fields got different or interrupted plowing patterns, just for interest.
The scruffy drystone wall on one end of one of the fields, the larger drystone wall assembly on the CD base, and the freestanding wall on a tongue depressor tucked in between the fields in the above photo are all made from decorative gravel and Gorilla Glue, a technique I first saw over either on Maiwand Days or Rabbits in my Basement, although it was apparently pioneered by TMP stalwart John the OFM.
Gorilla Glue has the fascinating properties of being water-activated and expanding 2- to 4-times as it cures — the stuff foams as it hardens, basically. Lay a thin bead of it down, dump a line of damp gravel over it, and it’ll fill some of the gaps between the gravel as it expands, and even lift and fill your wall out. Pretty cool, and I’ll be using it for producing a lot more scruffy stone walls, blast craters and similar terrain in the near future!
The fields with sand glued down for texture. Click for bigger, as usual.
Next step was a layer of white glue, then sand. My sand mix is actually about four different kinds of “decorator” sand, model railway ballast and similar, so it isn’t totally uniform.
Base coat and a bit of darker brown for some muddy bits. Click for larger.
The base coat is a medium brown, with a bit of a much darker brown mixed in. I wound up having to repeat the base coat, as I’d applied it quickly right at the end of the night, so it was patchy and too thin in spots. I used a bit more dark brown and even a bit of well-thinned black in the second coat, for better contrast with the eventual drybrushing. The ragged rock wall along the one end of one field was basecoated straight black at the same time.
Drybrushed (two passes) and basic flock added. Click for larger.
The day after the basecoat, I did two drybrushing passes, the first with a mix of the same base brown lightened with a pale brown/dark tan colour, mixed roughly 1:1. The second drybrush, even lighter, was a fairly pale tan colour. The stone wall got a fairly heavy dark grey drybrush, a lighter pale grey pass, then a final pass with pale grey mixed with white on just the tips of the rocks. Then it was back to the white glue to add bits of flocking, mostly around the edges. I might go back and add some sprouting crops or something low to some of the fields, but for now they’ll be empty and weedy, mostly because it’s easier to move troops over them this way.
I’m declaring these done for now and moving them out of the way to get back to Russian Civil War figures! Total time on this project, not including photos and writing it up, was a couple of hours over a couple of evenings, all in short bursts, interrupted by figure painting, the Internet, and other distractions!
Painted up the first bits from my December Ainsty order, the rifle crates and tea crates.
Rifle and tea crates from Ainsty, painted. Click for full size.
The rifle crates are really nice pieces, with well sculpted rifles and crates; the tea crates are plain but well made and look great. The whole lot is (as you’d expect from Ainsty) perfectly cast, with scarcely any visible bubbles or casting flaws.
Scale provided by a 28mm Brigade Games Russian priest.
As a diversion from painting Russians, I’ve painted up the first part of my recent Renedra plastics order from J&M Miniatures. I ordered two sprues of the mixed tents, and as I mentioned in my review, was very pleased with them. They’re solidly and cleanly cast and well proportioned, and they’ll suit a huge range of genres and eras.
Here’s the first sprue of tents painted up. The colours are a variety of khaki shades from the Reaper Master Series line, plus GW Gryhonne Sepia ink.
One sprue’s worth of Renedra tents all painted up. Once again Father Vodkanov of the White Russians provides scale. Click for larger.
I’ve got another sprue of tents still untouched (same six again), as well as the barrel and graveyard sprues still to do something with. They’re going to wait until after our local gaming convention the first weekend of February, though.
A few weeks ago, I took advantage of J & M Miniatures’ offer of free shipping for all of December to order a few bits and pieces of Renedra’s injection-molded plastic bits and pieces.
Before I move on to my quick review of the Renedra stuff, I just have to give a quick shout-out to James of J & M. I was already following his great wargaming blog Rabbits In My Basement, so when he announced he and a friend were launching a web/mail-order wargaming business I checked the site out. He’s got all sorts of good stuff from Perry, Renedra, 4Ground, Plastic Soldier Company and other companies, and is (as far as I can tell) the sole Canadian seller of some of these ranges. Given that domestic shipping is cheaper and skips the expense and irritation of occasionally being dinged by the nice folks at Canada Customs, as well as the great customer service I’ve gotten so far from James, I think it’s safe to say that a reasonable portion of my hobby budget will be heading toward Ontario in the future!
Moving on to the Renedra bits, I ordered two packs of their Mixed Tents, two packs of Barrels, and one pack of Gravestones.
Tents and barrels – all six tents from one of the Renedra sprues, the barrels assembled and unassembled. In the background, barrel sprues, figures and clutter! The cutting matt has a one inch/half inch grid, the figure is a 28mm Brigade Games White Russian priest.
The Mixed Tent sprue has two bell tents, two large ridge tents, and two small ones, each done with one open door and one closed tent. The bell tents are 2″ diameter (55mm) and 1 5/8th” tall (40mm); the ridge tents are 2 3/8ths long (60mm), 1 3/4″ wide (45mm) and 1 1/2″ tall (37mm), while the small ridge tents are 1 1/2″ long (37mm), 1 3/8″ wide (35mm) and 7/8″ high (20mm). They’re done in a medium grey plastic, and very solid – even the tents with open doors don’t flex much if you squeeze them a bit. These are nearly universal tents; you could put them (especially the two types of ridge tent) in nearly any historical setting and they’d fit right in. The bell tent is a bit more specific to the 19th and early 20th Century, but iconic in it’s time and place, up to World War Two or so, maybe later in some areas.
Filling the gaps between the tents on these sprues you get a nice campfire piece about 3/4″ across and two camp beds or stretchers with legs to hold them off the ground. Nice little bits of camp clutter to add detail and life to a camp scene on the tabletop, although the beds are going to need bases of some sort if they’re going to survive transport and use on the table.
I don’t generally base buildings, but I’ll likely base these tents. The ones with open doors especially will look better with a base, with a bit of canvas groundsheet visible in the door – the bell tent especially will have an especially visible interior when on the table, because of it’s design.
The Renedra barrel set has two sprues in brown plastic, one with five large barrels, the other with five small ones. As you can see from the photo above, each barrel half has one round end, which minimizes the visible seams on the completed barrels. Unfortunately, the side hoops don’t quite seem to perfectly align when you glue the halves together, but the tiny mismatch is really only visible when you’re handling the barrels and will be totally invisible on the table! These are an older style of barrel, with thin doubled hoops (wood, maybe?) instead of flatter metal hoops, so they’re more suitable for pre-modern gaming, but will work OK as clutter and freight on most pre-WW2 tables.
Finally, the Gravestone set has two identical sprues in grey plastic. Each has a variety of monument stones, all about 1″ tall and 1/2″ wide. You get 16 slab stones (one broken into two pieces), 4 crosses, a small column, a slab/vault topping, five bases that can fit a variety of the slabs and crosses, and finally a raven. These are all done in the same solid, strong grey plastic the tents are made from, more than strong enough for tabletop use. Two minor things bug me about this sprue, one being that only a few of the stones have any texture or detail on the backs; the rest are just smooth plastic without even a basic stone texture. Fixable with a bit of sandpaper, but still a detail that could easily have been fixed. The other is even more minor – after getting the excellent Ainsty gravestones with their readable, laser-engraved lettering and details the stylus-pushed-through-putty squiggles of these Renedra stones lettering and details does feel like a minor step backward. This is still a great set of grave markers, enough in one set for quite a large graveyard, and the raven is a neat, whimsical (or possibly gothic and ominous) touch!
The last thing in my J & M order wasn’t scenery, and wasn’t something I’d even ordered, but was (I assume) thrown in as a thank you gift from J & M – a very nice large suede dice bag, about 7″ wide and 9″ tall and bright red. My own dice are in a bag I hand-sewed myself nearly twenty years ago in junior high, but I think I’ll press the new bag into service to carry the collection of card decks, markers, tape measures and random gaming accessories that normally slops around loose in my backpack. It’s large enough for a couple of pencils, too.
Rummaging through other people’s blogs (as one does) I tripped over this nice two-part series on Eastern Front gates: Part One, Part Two from August 2012 on Miniatures & Terrain.
These gates with the tiny shingle roofs over them seem fairly common in Russia & parts of Eastern Europe, and I’ve been meaning to make one as part of a larger churchyard for my Russian onion-domed church.
In some ways, this smallish order of Ainsty resin scenery bits has been a decade in the making; I discovered Ainsty sometime in the very late 1990s or early 2000s, and even though I didn’t (at that point) do much in the way of skirmish gaming in 25/28mm, the huge variety of neat stuff Ainsty made stuck with me! So back in November I finally got around to throwing a bit of money Ainsty’s way, on a mix of scenic details that will see service in various pulp skirmish adventures, Russian Civil War battles, and who knows where else.
Here’s a quick late-night snapshot of what I got: Ainsty resin laid out for review. Click for full size.
General sculpting and casting quality is good and clean, although a number of the pieces have a slightly slick, greasy feel to the touch, almost certainly from the mold release used. A good scrub with dish soap and warm water should take care of that, and it should also help get rid of the last of the faint but definite smell of outgassing resin I got when I first unpacked the pieces from the small plastic bags each set was carefully packed in.
Clockwise from top left, here’s a quick review of what I got.
Top left is Trade Goods J Stacked Sacks, three each of four different roughly square sets of stacked sacks. They’re all about 1″ a side at the base, and the tallest stacks are just over 1″ tall. They’ll provide useful cover for docks and warehouses, although a bit more fabric texture on the sacks would have been nice.
Moving clockwise, I got two sets of Trade Goods B Tea Chests. This is described as 18 chests, but it’s really four stacks and three single tea chests. Again, useful cover, and like sacks, the sort of terrain bit that you could build yourself, but which can be fiddly and frustrating to mass-produce at home. I could definitely see throwing another set or two of these into any future Ainsty order; you can never have enough crates cluttering up warehouses in pulp games, especially if they’re in precarious, badly stacked piles just waiting to topple onto someone!
Bottom right we have Trade Goods L Mixed Piles x 4, which is a neat little set of crates, bales, barrels and sacks, up to about 3/4″ tall. This is pretty close to “universal cargo” for anytime from the early-mid 20th Century back at least four or five centuries. Each of the four piles is different, with two of mixed crates, sacks and other baggage, one pile of three canvas bales and one of three small-to-medium wooden barrels.
Moving clockwise once more to bottom centre, we have Mixed Memorials x4, which is a nice mix-and-match set of four bases and four tops for memorials or possibly fancy gateposts. The four base pieces are each different, with two of them having very fine (probably laser-etched?) lettering on the molded plaques on one face. The four top pieces are also each different, with two slightly different obelisk toppers and two lower pieces. One of the bases arrived with a minor chip off one corner, but given that full size monuments out in the real world get dings and chips too, I’m not going to worry about it. The tops of all the bases are finished, so you could even leave the toppers off for further variety. One of the low toppers has been sanded at a bit of a rakish angle on it’s bottom suface, but a few passes on sandpaper will correct that enough to be invisible.
At the centre of the group we have Upright Headstones x8, which are by far the most detailed pieces in my order. Each of the eight headstones is unique, and I’m almost certain they’ve been laser etched, as the lettering is actually completely readable despite being under 2mm tall. The headstones commemorate Kurt Cobain, Bella Lugosi, Gandhi, and others, including two with “A Soldier of the Great War/Known Unto God” on them, which is the wording used for unidentified soldiers buried in the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission’s cemeteries from World War One. My only minor complaint is the massive size of these headstones; the tallest is a full inch tall, or nearly shoulder height on a standing 28mm figure. There certainly are headstones this massive in real life, but memorial stones about 2/3rds this size seem a lot more common in most cemeteries I’ve seen. One of the stones had a tiny casting flaw in each side, but those will be easy to file into minor damage to the stone and won’t be an issue.
Finally, bottom left we have Trade Goods K Rifle Cases x5, with two closed and three open wooden crates holding rifles. One of the seperate crate lids has a rifle resting on it; the open crates show one or two rifles each and the greased cloth that would have been used as packing to preserve and secure the rifles. Everyone always needs more guns (well, in games, anyway), so I suspect these are going to get a lot of use in all sorts of scenarios, as loot or as objective markers of sorts. The detail is very nice on this set, with good wood grain in the crates and enough detail in the rifles to make it obvious what they are. These crates would be suitable from about the mid-19th Century up to modern day, depending on where your adventure was set.
I will definitely put another order in to Ainsty at least once in 2013, after I get this current order all painted up. Shipping time from the UK to Canada was fast, although Ainsty obviously does a lot of it’s casting to order, as there was a delay of about three weeks (November 17th to December 10th) between placement and shipping of my order. The usual fast Royal Mail-Canada Post connection worked nicely in my favour, as it usually does, though, so overall order time was entirely reasonable.
More (with better photos!) as I paint up and finish all the various bits I’ve just acquired!
(oh, and in honour of this being published on December 21st 2012: If you can read this, congratulations, the Mayan Apocalypse never happened. What a surprise…)
Been a bit quiet around here recently; blame a very strange and fractured work schedule for that, mostly, as well as the fact that I’ve got a whole bunch of projects (RCW sailors and cavalry, among other things) in the fairly early stages of development and thus not suitable for showing off here! Progress is being made, though, and I have another Russian Civil War game planned for later this month, so that’s my deadline for the horses and sailors, at least!
To tide you over (and because they relate closely to an upcoming terrain project I’m planning…) here’s a pair of useful links, both from the Empire of Ghosts blog.
The second and related is Tutorial: Making Realistic Barbed Wire Cheaply, which results in good looking barbed wire with the aid of a couple of sizes of thin wire and a drill. I’m not sure I’m going to be using this technique (I have another plan that might be even easier…) but it looks good.
More actual content soon, I promise, and Corey has several projects underway that he has promised to write up as well.
This should be worth watching: Curt of Analogue Hobbies is beginning a Great War in Greyscale project. Most figures in greyscale, officers in a very dramatic desaturated “chiaroscuro” colour scheme, and (hopefully!) greyscale terrain as well. There have been other greyscale wargaming projects out there (Curt links to a couple) and I’ve seen some very dramatic dioramas done that way, too. It’s been something I’ve considered off and on (it certainly fits with my usual pulp/interwar/WW1 focus) but have never done anything about. I’ll be watching Curt’s project with great interest!
Over on the always-excellent Lead Adventure Forum, Dr Mathias is not only winning the current Lead Painters League but has produced a very fine tutorial on big jungle-canopy trees that has me itching to clear my bench and get some scenery built. I even have a small tube that used to hold small glowsticks that could be the first tree trunk…
To round out this post, another tutorial posted on LAF, Elladan’s inspiring Making of a Teddybear-fur Mat, which is also posted over on his own website. If you’ve never seen Elladan’s website before, get over there and have a look around. All sorts of awesome stuff, and more fake-fur mat work over there too.
