Well of Sorrow and Dreams

So, happy to divert myself from what I was supposed to be doing for any number of other projects, inset about building myself a pool to use for Frostgrave.

And here it is.

I started out rooting around in my boxes of useful bits (which I really need to reduce, as there’s an almost comical amount of old polystyrene and bits of plastic packaging down in the basement now) and found a bit of plastic pipe that I’m fairly certain I scavenged from work when we had a plumber in. It was cut fairly unevenly, so I measured it round and corrected that with a mix of clipping and sanding:

Just like all my terrain, it got a base from the mystery board that I rescued from a skip at work (starting to sense a pattern here):

And then began the process of adding bricks!

I’ve still got a load left over from when I overestimated how many I’d need to gussy up some modern ruins. They’re fairly roughly cut, but I think this variation just adds to the effect. I used tweezers to dip each brick individually in a bowl of glue before applying it to the pipe:

And here it is partway done, checking scale with the nearest mini:

I guess if it was a pool designed for people to drink from it would probably be a lot lower, but I also wanted it to be a piece of blocking terrain, so it’s a bit taller than would perhaps be ‘realistic’ (he says, discussing the logistics of a magic pool in an imaginary magic city). 

Once the outside was done, I considered how to finish the inside. I could have thrown some plaster in there and painted it up like dirt/mud, but in the end decided to brick it that side too:

Et voila:

To hide the remaining visible bits of the pipe, I cut some rough capstones to make a lip:

And that was building complete. When using cork, if you don’t protect it in some way it can easily rip and dent during painting if you drybrush a bit roughly, so I dug out my old faithful cheap superglue from Poundland.

A tube of this did only a tiny proportion of the piece though (usually I’m only using it on single rocks or bricks on bases) so I dig out some mod podge to give it a good coating of to toughen it up.

Then it was into painting, which apparently I didn’t take any WIP pics of. The stones for the same treatment as all of my ruins, while the pool got a dark blue base. I tried flicking white paint onto it from a brushes bristles to try and create the illusion of reflected stars, but that didn’t go well at all so I got a bit more creative (there was some finger painting involved):

For the water, I decided I wanted to try some water effect for the first time. My wife has a resin kit she’s been planning on trying out, but we haven’t yet found any time where the children wouldn’t poke their fingers into it to try it. Then I remembered that I have a pot of yacht varnish (which I’m fairly sure my wife bought during one of the lockdowns as the ship didn’t have what I was actually after) and I figured I’d give that a go, as if it didn’t end up looking like realistic water, that was probably still fine, as I could handwave it as magic! So I poured in a thin layer, and waited:

Now it turns out that my idea of what constitutes a thin layer and what the universe does varies somewhat, and I’d poured it too thick. The top cured fine, but it was still very squishy underneath. Oh well, I though, I’ll wait a little longer. And then I accidentally left it on a surface with a very slight slope:

The wrinkly set in it, but underneath was still very squishy. Turning to google, it turns out that varnish doesn’t just cure with time, but with contact with oxygen. Not a problem, I thought, I’ll pop some pinholes in the surface layer to let some oxygen in, cure the bottom, then cover up anything that looks a bit wonky with further layers of varnish - and with a bit of luck, any pin pricks will just look like bubbles! 

Obviously this didn’t work, and as soon as I put the holes in the surface layer it started ballooning up, and I decided to peel the whole thing out:

Having removed the surface layer and scraped any odd chunks out of the edges, I then left the thin layer that remained to cure:

And it did! Over the course of a couple of weeks I then applied very, very thin layers, until it built up to a level that I was happy with (lower than I’d originally planned, but at this point I didn’t want it to go wrong again) and it looked like this:

Result!

So, what did I learn? Thin layers, mostly. The varnish dried slightly yellow, but I think if I’m painting on thin layers that would probably be fine when making a pool or a river rather than necessarily going out and getting a ‘proper’ water effect…

Can’t see the wood for the trees...

Progress marches steadily on with my checklist of things I need to be able to play Rangers of Shadow Deep, this time furnishing me with some trees:

I wanted some proper old school bottle brush looking trees, and so inspired by one of the Luke’s APS YouTube videos set about making some of my own!

[brief side note - although in this post it will look like I knocked these out in short order, these pictures cover an eleven month span!]

Back in the early days of the original pandemic lockdown, I ordered some gutter guard on eBay - cost about a tenner, and came with enough to make plenty of trees whilst still having enough to still use on my gutters if I so choose:

I cut out some bases using the same thin board that was liberated from a skip at some point in the distant past:

This actually took ages to do, as I cut out a dozen circles using knives. I recently discovered that I can just cut the board using scissors in a fraction of the time, which would have turned this into a ten minute job rather than several sessions over several days! 

After bevelling the edges, I cut some trunks out of rod (textured with a variety of knives and wire brushes to look more like bark) and hot glued them onto the bases, then made some hot glue roots as per the video that inspired all this. I used a dremel attachment that I’d never used before to drill holes in the trunks to later take the bodies of the trees, which was a bit nerve wracking!

Thankfully I didn’t injure myself or any of the furniture, and with a quick sweep up of the sawdust now coating everything in the front room my wife was none the wiser by the time she got home.

I basecoated the trees using acrylics rather than model paint, because model paint is expensive. It didn’t cover the hot glue roots particularly well, but I wasn’t overly mad about that as I knew it would be getting plenty of drybrushing which would hopefully cover any wonky looking bits.

At this point in our story, four months have passed, and it’s now my birthday at the end of August. Finding myself with some free time while my wife makes brisket (continuing the now tradition of having a garbage plate of a selection of tasty things for my birthday dinner), I decided to make up some ground texture to use on the tree bases.

I mean everyone has a tub of sieved sand in their house right? All of this was globbed together to make what is essentially very bumpy grey filler, which was then globbed onto the bases and poked into all the nooks and crannies between roots with a broken coffee stirrer.

I’d pre-coloured the filler mix so that I wouldn’t have to base coat it and could just paint over the top of it. Normally I’d prime something like this for an even colour (as well as helping to stick the sand down even more) but I figured that the filler would do a fine job of keeping everything together.

The bases got the usual washes and dry brushes that ground cover gets, and were finished off with some flock and static grass to make them look a little more lively:

Fun fact - when you’re sticking on sparse patches like this, do an odd number and it looks more natural. Every now and then I’d accidentally do four patches of grass on a base and it would just look... weird, unnatural. 

More time passes.

We’re now in another lockdown, and I double down to try and crack through my list of things I need to complete before I can play a solo wargame (interesting aside - a buddy and I often discuss these sort of self imposed targets, and how some people just really want to play the game so play with paper cut outs, whereas we set ourselves these targets and don’t end up actually playing, but that might be a longer discussion for another time...) and I pull the gutter guard out of the basement. Where it’s been coiled up for so long, it’s no longer looking as bottle brush round as it once did:

I take to the internet for advice, and try various methods of heating it up and reshaping it, but none work particularly effectively so I go with the advice given by Luke of Luke’s APS:

So I figured I’d crack on regardless. Word to the wise - cutting through the twisted wire core of the gutter guard takes a whole lot of squeezing, so be prepared for some hand ache!

Using a pair of long bladed scissors, I set about trimming the gutter guard down into tree like shapes. If you try and do this at home, make sure you put something down to catch your trimmings - I tried to vacuum them up off the rug and the plastic just did not get picked up at all, leaving me having to scrub it up with a brush and pick individual bits out of the rug with my fingers...

Pictured in the foreground, the offending fibers:

I’ve kept a baggie of these just in case, because most wargamers are terrible packrats. You could probably use them for a nice thatch effect...

Some cutting later, I had a scrap polystyrene forest porcupine:

I gave them a spray of nato green to cover the metallic wire core, and also so that any areas that showed through the flock wouldn’t be jarringly black.

Other learnings - if it’s raining and you try to turn your downstairs toilet into a sneaky spray booth, just opening the little window in there isn’t enough...

Then it was just a case of flocking the trees - I filled a spray bottle with diluted PVA (with a little splash of washing up liquid) and set about dousing the trees and sprinkling on the homemade flock from a previous post:

I then gave them another good soaking of sticky water and left them to dry in the conservatory:

Once this is dry, a few of the trees that I thought would look better flocked have not in fact been miraculously saved by the process, so I gave them a bit of a trim. There are also some areas where some unflocked branches are poking out, which I also take this opportunity to prune:

The flock was still coming off more than I’d like, so I wanted to seal them further. Unfortunately, the only varnish I had in the house was satin rather than matt, so I again took to the internet. Apparently model railroaders have used hairspray for years, and I had some in the basement already so decided to give it a whirl. It didn’t do a great deal to seal the trees.

Additional learnings - just because hairspray doesn’t state that it’s scented doesn’t by default mean that it’s unscented, a lesson I learnt the hard way. Also, don’t spray in the conservatory where you’ve got some cans of beer chilling unless you want a fruity surprise when you later drink one...

My wife had to go to Poundland to get some bits, so I asked her if she could check for Matt varnish there, having seen some people mention getting it from there. Our local branch however isn’t one that has Matt varnish, although she did get me a pot of gloss yacht varnish (which I was tempted to try mixing into my diluted PVA to add some toughness but didn’t in the end for fear of ruining everything and not being able to undo it) and a can of spray adhesive, which I tentatively tested on one of the trees but unfortunately rather than coming out as a fine mist shot ropes of glue like silly string, so one of the trees is noticeably chonkier than the others after I tried to hide that with additional flock!

I then doused them in watered down PVA again, hoping that this would be the step that sealed them once and for all.

Once this has dried though, they were still leaking flock like a bucket with a hole in, and I figured I’d just base them up and be done with it! 

A glob of hot glue in each trunk affixed them securely, and we were done bar sweeping up the flock now all over the table. 

They also conveniently fit exactly into one of the drawers on the unit I currently have my finished terrain in:

So, on the one hand overall they didn’t come out quite how I’d hoped, but on the other hand they are so much better than the trees I had before (which was in fact zero trees). Plus, one step closer to playing a game (which with any luck will be before I have to go back to work)

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens

In unrelated news, I’ve been looking at a blister of Bishoujo Senshi from Rezolution on eBay for a while, pondering whether I should just treat myself and buy it after mentioning them in my plans for the Cyberpunk project iirc. I didn’t end up buying them in the end. Which is probably a good thing as look what I found in the drawer I cleared out to make space for the trees:

Apparently I bought a blister of them already, potentially a decade ago, and forgot! I think it’s actually the Yuurei that I still wanted, but I’d misremembered the name...

Zomtober 2018 week 4

And so, we find ourselves at the final Sunday deadline of this year's Zomtober, surprisingly having not once missed a posting deadline (he types, tempting fate). Thus, I present another six zombies, three at a time (because the pictures get even worse if I try to squeeze them all into one picture), which I think takes me to having painted one of every unique walker sculpt in my Walking Dead starter box bar the zombified Rick figure:

These three are fairly plain, and include the Limited Edition 'Ronnie' walker (the lad in the shirt emblazoned with multiple letter M's). I saw a picture of the actual chap that the sculpt is based on this week, and have no idea why I'd envisioned him as a redhead. Ah well, I still think it rather suits him...

Three walkers that I'm infinitely more pleased with - the first I love for the dodgy freehand on the vest; the second is a lovely figure, being from the Limited Edition Clementine & Lee Booster; and the third I love because despite a slightly odd facial sculpt (having a face shape not unlike a Necron) and appearing to be draped in a bin bag there's just something brilliant about it, and I thoroughly enjoyed painting it. I also went all out on painting texture on the jeans on this figure that is pretty much unnoticeable in these pictures (and real life), but hey I know it's there [he weeps].

Here's another angle on the deer-munching figure, as his hunched pose makes it a little hard to see when photographed with his pals:

Side Note: I haven't played any of the Telltale Games Walking Dead games, so don't really know the significance of this figure. I probably should get around to it one of these days...

But what's that, there's more?

Not content with just painting zombies for Zomtober, I wanted to try and add another Spawn Point to my collection to go with the ones from a previous year, to take my total up to four, which seems a better number for spreading around a table evenly...

My plan was to make a Spawn Point inspired by the mounds of bodies that appear in a Walking Dead app that I briefly played some time last year (might have been called Road to... something. I forget). Several levels had these mounds of bodies that every so often would wiggle and disgorge more walkers, and I quite liked the idea of trying to produce something inspired by them in miniature form!

I grabbed a base to match my previous ones, and set about cutting some cork to make a mound (in order to give the piece some additional height without having to use more miniatures that you wouldn't even see in the middle of the pile):

A couple of round bases made the perfect templates to give a regularly rising slope:

Although when I posed a miniature next to it, I decided that maybe it needed a little boost and gave it another layer of cork for height:

I popped a weight on top to hold it down while the glue dried (I started with PVA, but added some superglue when that took too long to set), and once it had, I applied some filler to smooth out the transitions between layers:

It was at this point that I realised that I'd grabbed the wrong tube of filler, having grabbed a tiling one that is more rubbery that that which I would normally use. Taking a Bob Ross like approach of 'happy little accidents', I figured I'd press on and see how it turned out.

I deliberated on whether to sand the base now (in order to make sure that there were no missed spots, as there might be if I tried to apply glue into the nooks and crannies between figures) or after I'd applied the figures (in order to make them look like they were slightly buried), and settled on the former. I didn't take a picture of that step, oddly, but imagine a slightly sad tiny wedding cake covered in sand and grit and you wouldn't be far off.

Now, for the bodies, I sifted through several boxes of odds and ends and came up with a few Doctor Who Miniatures figures, some Heroclix, as well as a Mantic Walking Dead Walker that I have several copies of the same sculpt of (one of which you've seen earlier in this post - I got two in my starter box, and I think got a couple as a sample at a previous Salute), and then scavenged some left over limbs and other assorted body parts from sprues, everything from zulus to Frostgrave Barbarians!

I tried the old 'hot water trick' on the Doctor Who figures to try and make them lie more naturally, but they didn't seem to take to it as well as other figures I've tried it on, so I had to fall back on cutting and re-positioning limbs, cunning placement, and in the end an avant-garde approach to realism. I also cut out some short lengths of sprue that I sunk into the base (thanks slightly softer than usual filler for making it so easy to jab a piece in, then fill the resulting hole with glue to hold it in place) to look like lengths of metal rebar poking out of the ground and rubble - a few were positioned to make it look as if the bodes had come to rest on them, rather than having a limb mysteriously held upwards of it's own volition!

A couple of nights of carefully piling tiny bodies, and I had my mound ready for a blast of spray undercoat:

Then it was just a case of frantically getting it painted as the Sunday posting deadline loomed ever closer! I went with a fairly muted palette, figuring that it's more a piece of terrain than an eye catching figure, and went to town weathering everything with grimy washes, as well as stippling on various shades of dust and grime, before finishing with a healthy dose of blood effects:

Here you can see the detail that I added to make it a Spawn Point rather than just a macabre piece of blocking terrain, a zombie hauling himself out from under the pile of bodies made from a Wargames Factory zombie body and reaching arm with a Westwind zombie head (as the Wargames Factory zombie face sculpts are awful, and only really useful to fill gaps between corpses on the pile as they do here):

Here is a size comparison against one of my original Spawn Points:

And with a survivor:

Whilst taking the pictures for this post, I realised that the base for this one was noticeably darker than everything else that I've finished, so went back and gave it an additional Bleached/Ushabti Bone drybrush, so now it looks more like this:

The piece as a whole is much darker than everything else I've finished, but hey, it's a grubby pile of bloody bodies, that's to be expected! If anything, I should probably go back and bloody up the ground a little more...

So, with that included, here is this Zomtober's complete output:

Not bad going at all, I think! I just need to paint some Survivors and I could even try out the All Out War rules in order to procrastinate on playtesting my own...

Which brings the Tally to:

32 vs -46 = +78

Hmm, 20 more figures to paint in the next two months if I'm going to hit that 'average one painted figure a week by the end of the year' challenge I set myself...

Also, for the first time in the history of ever, I'm disappointed that it's a four rather than five week Zomtober this year, as there were a few more bits that I had on the go that didn't managed to get finished in time to get added to this final submission. Who knows, maybe I'll get them finished and have a bonus fifth week post next week; maybe my hobby focus will sweep on to something else and they won't see the light of day until next year's Zomtober...