Big Bob

 For the last five years it has been a New Year's tradition for me to paint along with Bob Ross. For about the same amount of time I have had a large canvas made up to go behind my gaming table as a scenic backdrop. I kept putting off starting on it because I was a bit scared... but this year I finally summoned the courage.

This wasn't all done in one sitting, it took four innings- the sky, the rocky midground, the foreground and then some tweaking on the foliage. After so long of it sitting in a corner of the studio I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to look like and it has turned out much as I imagines. I have been compositing and cribbing up of Joy of Painting episodes to find the right features! Sadly the light is pretty poor at the moment so this isn't a brilliant photo. Hopefully I'll be at home in daylight sometime soon to take better photos.

Big Bob

Search for La Maisontaal- The Hills Have I

 

Just a little update today. Two hills. That biggun on the right with the ramp leading up to it is the base for the expanded La Maisontaal which occupies a full eighth of the far side of the board.

This close up of the assault on the gates shows the ramp up, almost 40mm of space in front of the main gate (ogres almost fit!), a slight lip at the top (enough to perch a 20mm base on, just), the striations in the hill below the ruined tower and a whole lotta lichen blending it into the base board!

Those base sizes are a really handy gauge for measurement! Wouldn't get that help with an integral base... The building itself looks to be base on the ruined building from the Citadel Journal with an added hall on the left hand side and possibly a bit of oversizing. I have the templates so I can build a mock-up and see how the sizing looks on the hill.

The second hill is a little riser for the watchtower. In my previous test-fit photo it almost vanished behind the farmhouse when viewed from table level so to have the photo right it must be on a hill. Entirely appropriate given it's a watchtower...

That's better. Placed a bit further away from the house and viewed at a slightly higher angle it should look fine. You can't see anything at all of the hill in the photo and there are no other angles of this building so I had free rein. I decided on a low mound with a slope leading to the door and very little behind the tower itself so it can fit nice and tightly in the space. 

Search for La Maisontaal- The Hills Have I

Search for La Maisontaal- a shrubbery!

The village next to La Maisontaal is beginning to look inhabited! Buildings undercoated, Britains trees built, Merit fences and rubberised horsehair hedges affixed to bases.

I'm very glad Mike put me onto the Merit fences. They're much smaller (OO scale) than I would have built them had I scratchbuilt. I did the bases before the fences arrived based off guesswork form comparison with the buildings and size of the boards. When I first saw the fences I thought they'd be way too small, but they match up pretty perfectly, so that's a nice confirmation from both ends. Thanks also to Mike for the trees! You can have them back afterwards. :)

Need to get the angle right and find a suitable camera lens, but it feels close. That watchtower needs a hill!

Search for La Maisontaal- a shrubbery!

Search for Las Maisontaal- building the village

 

I've almost got the structures of all the buildings for the village done now. This is the second time of building for them as I did the Townscapes project several years back, but those I put my own spin on, these I wanted to try and get closer to (I expect) Dave Andrews' builds as shown in the pictures. In fact, could this be Dave Andrews' own table? Anyone know how to reach him and ask?

This picture gives the fullest view of the village which is spread out along the curving road. It's the only shot that shows the watchtower and farmhouse lurking in back there. There's also a sneaky little building popping out behind the half-timbered house. Going by the Townscapes origin of the other buildings I suspect this is Fritzy's kennel.

The farmhouse is only shown from the back in the photo and isn't too clear so I took a few liberties scribing stones into the bottom section and herringbone brick on the top. I think when painted the dark/light areas should make it close to the photo. For some reason the panels in the left wing of the house are squarer/wider than they look in the book photo despite the overall house measurements being taken from the actual Townscapes building. It's probably the extra 6mm generated by cladding in Depron foam, strange how a small change makes so much difference working this small.

The watchtower I pretty much made the same as the last one I did. I could probably just have used that but I felt like having another go. This one has the same style roof as the other buildings in this batch (laser cut ivory card tiles with vectors taken from the actual Townscapes roofs) rather than the cast resin shingles I put on the previous one.

The half-timbered house can be seen in both photos, but only from this kind of angle, and largely obscured by hedge. They obviously don't want their neighbours seeing what's going on within. 

Here's Fritzy's kennel, ready to hang out mysteriously behind the back corner of the house. It's quite large, Fritzy must be a biiiiiig dog!

The cottage we have two clear views of, in the black and white picture and the full colour spread. The Townscapes building has a lean-to on one side but it's not clear from either picture if the one on this board does. I suspect looking closely that it does, some kind of ridgeline can be seen projecting from the far side, but I opted to do the house without. Some of the exposed brick visible on the Townscapes card model is in evidence on the front view so I have kept it on the back. I've put a couple of windows on the hidden side of the building to give the poor inhabitants a bit more light... and a nice view of the hordes come to loot and pillage!

The barn can be seen in all three of the photos of this side of the board. It's a pretty simple structure but fun to make. There's clearly some kind of poster on the wall on the river side which I will have to make some decisions about.

Making the front timbers really weathered with a steel brush and my spiky modelling tool was a lot of fun. 

The above photo also gives the clearest view of the privy. I'm pretty certain that the one in the photo is actually the card Townscapes one, not a nicely built version of it. Nevertheless I thought I'd make a nice one out of coffee stirrers anyway.

There are pretty good shots of the mill in these photos too, perched atop the stream. It doesn't show evidence of the wheel (I guess there's a small one inside then?) and preserves the door in a strange position right on the edge of the water. Logically if the wheel is (far too small and) in that archway then the grinding stones are positioned in the right wing and the grain store is presumably the upper floor of the big timbered barn part. I've put some bigger doors on the parts of the building you can't see in the book photos as it makes far more sense for cartloads of grain to be delivered from this side. I've also changed where the openings for winching sacks are on the building as where they are on the card model doesn't really make sense. The rear ramp is clearly not in evidence in the book photos so I haven't built it. Not really needed given the surrounding terrain. 

Search for Las Maisontaal- building the village

Search for La Maisontaal- bridge and board

Remember that bridge? Well, it IS that bridge! Hoorah, we were looking at the other side of it. The elderly vacuum form plastic was quite brittle so I have epoxied the cracks and infilled with dental plaster. Now mounted on MDF boards it should be durable enough to march a regiment of orcs over.

All our students have gone home for the summer now, hooray! I can put one of the big workshop tables to use laying it all out. Time to make the boards then. Ordinarily I would use high density extruded foam for my modular terrain boards. It's stronger, carves better, holds sharp edges etc. etc. BUT I wanted to be a bit more authentic and I suspect that the original board would have been standard 1" polystyrene ceiling tiles so I bought cheap expanded polystyrene tiles to use. The postage was as much as the tiles themselves and I think all in they cost under £25 which for an 8x4 base board is bargain. Fortunately there's not much (apart from the river, nothing in fact) surface undulation, they might just as well have been flat wooden tiles! They're actually a tad smaller than 2' square but that 5mm doesn't make a whole lot of difference. Because they are very brittle I have mounted them on some 9mm MDF. Also means I have a nice smooth surface to paint my river onto. The tiles were too big to put through a bandsaw or hotwire cutter so I hacked them with a stanley knife. Nice rough, rocky riverbank edges.

I've covered the polystyrene in two layers of a diluted PVA/Filite mix. Filite is an additive powder usually used in fibreglass and plaster casting applications. Mixed with the PVA (wear a mask, use extraction etc.) it's a poor man's Jesmonite and forms a nice hard shell over the foam, protecting it from dents and knocks. After that was dry I gave the top of each tile a smooth coat of PVA and dumped sand on top until the wet patches where the glue is soaking into the grains stopped coming through. When it was completely dry I tipped off the excess and gave the tile a spray with Isopropyl alcohol (smelly, wear a mask, ventilate etc.) then soaked it with very diluted PVA, about 75% water. Then I sprinkled a bunch more sand on top and again left it to dry overnight. The top surfaces are now rock hard and have a suitable base texture (and colour actually) to work onto. But, the bridge is looking lonely, let's see if we can do something about that.

Some years back I converted all the Townscapes buildings into files for laser cutting, so it was a quick and easy job to find the bits I needed for this layout. They're all Dave Andrews (I presume) models either using the Townscapes buildings as templates or possibly prototypes that the eventual card buildings were based on. There's the mill, cottage, farmhouse, watch tower, barn, half timbered house and loo. 

The pictures of the village part of the build are grainy and difficult to see clearly, but should give me enough information to do the balsa wood framing etc. If anyone knows of pictures of these exact buildings turning up in other publications at the time do let me know! I actually already have all of these buildings made up, but as I did them without reference to these pictures I'm going to do them again getting as close as I can.

I've also cut myself a bunch of bases for the hedgerows, fences etc. Many of these are coconut/coir fibre hedgerows but there are some fences in there as well which Mike thinks are Merit. I've guestimated the size of the hedges etc. from the bases of units around them and I think they look pretty close. 120mmx20mm with angled ends to bend around curves. I've now used this placement to mark in the road for painting.

 Beginning to start looking like something!

Search for La Maisontaal- bridge and board

Search for La Maisontaal- a bridge too far?

 

I expect I was not the first kid to have opened the 'big orange book' and been completely bowled over by this picture. Since the very early days of my interest in fantasy wargames this has been 'THE' table to aspire to. It appears in a few pictures in the 3rd edition rulebook, but not as many as my memory insists, and nowhere else to my knowledge. There's a strong possibility it wasn't even a Studio table as nobody seems to remember it (and I would have thought you would if you had played on it!). Of course, teenaged me was unable to identify a lot of elements on the table and didn't have the skills to get anywhere near. The best we managed was to cover my mate's bedroom carpet in earth and dried moss after deciding to just go into the woods, grab handfuls and stick it to a chipboard base with PVA glue.

Some 6 (?) years back Oldhammer Community member Justin Coutange began making his own recreation of this epic piece. Sadly Justin lost the battle with cancer before he was able to get the project completed but it was such a great experience watching his progress since it was also something I had long wanted to try. This year marks my 40th year on earth and I plan to host a big weekend battle to mark the occasion. The main hosts will be my Empire and Undead armies, the Undead, of course, based around Heinrich Kemler's victory at La Maisontaal- which just happens to be sat in the corner of this table. What better excuse to have a crack at it? I'll need something to do once I've finished painting my Night Gobbos...

There are many pieces on here recognisable to my now-experienced GW collector eye, Townscapes buildings (or better crafted versions of) and La Maisontaal from the Journal, but there are a few non-GW elements I needed some help identifying. Enter Mike from Broadswords and Beasts, an expert in dissecting old photos and finding the miniatures and scenery lurking in the graininess... These shots are actually pretty decent compared to a lot of the magazine images he has successfully recreated! He was able to identify the trees as Britains Floral Garden Oaks and thought the bridge might be Bellona, a company that did vacuum-formed terrain in the 70s and 80s. He had a couple of their bridges but after comparing the shots they weren't quite right. Now I am totally OK with scratch-building this bridge, it's not that complicated, but if an existing piece is obtainable well that just makes it more authentic, right?

Doing some Google digging I was able to locate a Bellona catalogue showing three bridges. U-RV1 top left and U-RV3 top right I believe are the two bridges Mike had, one with buttresses and the other too stubby. The one in between, U-RV2, however, looks perfect. I was completely unable to find any photos online of this bridge, but Mike but the word out through some of his vintage toy and wargames networks and found a chap who had one. Here it is (below, shown with a couple of U-RV9 'Bridge in Ruins'es)

This very example should be with us shortly, and even if it isn't exactly right it look close enough to my eye, especially as it can be easily adjusted and painted. It will probably need a bit of reinforcement anyway as 40-year-old HIPS isn't particularly robust. It's interesting outlining the stonework as, starting from the distinctive L-shaped block, much of it seems to correspond, albeit a bit distorted. There are some blocks, however, that look shifted, stretched, or just completely different. It's always possible that is down to the painting (since vac form necessitates low relief and joins can be added or removed without standing out) or addition of filler where the bridge has been sunk into the bank, but I think there's another more possible explanation... we might be looking at the other side of the bridge! Time will tell when it arrives.  

Search for La Maisontaal- a bridge too far?

Salute 2024... DEMO GAME BOARD PART 4-

 

I spent quite a few weeks thinking about how I was going to approach the water on this board. I checked out several 'realistic ocean waves' tutorials, some good, some not so realistic. I decided against foil waves and tissue paper waves as I wanted the transparency to them. These techniques look great on a small-scale model railway layout but they're a bit fragile and not all that convincing in 28mm. I had already done the resin pour, knowing that I wanted that layer or translucency to create depth- although as it turned out I over-pigmented because the green came out too strong so it's not as translucent as I would have liked. I did see an interesting video making a big wave from resin, which intrigues me but which had the opposite problem, it looks too big unless I want all my models to get swamped. However I wondered if I could combine two effects, making a silicone wave bed and a foil one (to test both approaches) and casting clear resin into it. Not having any silicone to hand I started playing with No More Nails... 

When messing around with the No More Nails I found it was pretty easy to work it into convincing waves forms for the kind of rough, crashing water I wanted. No point doing water if it's not dynamic! Initially I thought I would do all my waves with this and then paint where he light would come through the wave bright turquoise like the land descending below the surface. On my test pieces though this wasn't very effective. The crests were good (though No More Nails sets kinda creamish, not ideal but ok for slightly scummy water) but the body of the wave didn't look right. On previous builds I have done big water effects with clear silicone, but I wanted to be able to add foam and spray which wouldn't stick to this. A couple of other videos lead me to Fix All Crystal Clear which I could easily pick up from Screwfix. I did a couple of tests and instantly decided this was what I was going to use. It's quite blue tinted, which would piss me off if I had bought it for DIY purposes, but works perfectly for adding the layer of translucency I wanted from the resin.

Most people using this acrylic polymer product are cutting it with Isopropyl Alcohol which gives a kind of jelly substance that can be spread. That's ok for a leisurely flowing river. I kept mine neat because I wanted to lay it on thick and pull it around with a coffee stirrer, using the viscosity to make big ocean wave forms. It dries pretty fast so I could lay down a good bed, work it into small crests, then build big waves over the top after waiting ten minutes or so for it to harden. Initially I was laying it in quite fine ribbons across the direction I wanted the waves travelling, blending these together with a swirling motion. I soon found that this was producing quite a delicate rippling effect, not the dynamic peaks and troughs I wanted so I cut the nozzle right back to lay down big thick sausages. In hindsight before I did this I should have done the area up against the beach with the finer nozzle to create more delicate lapping, but I wasn't sure if I was going to have enough and wanted to prioritise doing the small bard as a test and then the demo board. As it turned out I had almost exactly the right amount, a bit left over.

Once it was set I used a blue ink to wash into the big furrows and under he big waves, adding more depth. This made the acrylic polymer quite dull, previously it was super-glossy. I went over these areas with Liquitex Heavy Gloss medium to bring back the shine and found that it set the Fix All much firmer. Not quite solid but definitely less spongey. I went back and covered all the water with the gloss medium. This added some extra small ripples and firmed everything up.

The Fix All allowed me to build quite tall waves in three or four passes. I may have got a bit carried away and forgotten that less is more... but DYNAMISM! This wave above I tried to copy as close as I could from a photo of water crashing into a similar cave mouth. The white crests I made with No More Nails which bonds just fine to the acrylic polymer and can itself be built up quite heavily if desired. I applied this with a coffee stirrer though as I felt the gun was a bit overkill.

I added a little bit of foam on top of the crests with dabs of No More Nails, but only on the bigger crests. Since it goes quite yellow when it sets I want to do most of the frothy wave tops with white acrylic paint. I did also go around the board at this point and put in where the waves would reach with the gloss heavy gel to make them look wet and slippery. I realised afterwards what I should have done was to paint this area darker where the water would soak into the rock itself. Might have to go back later and do that.

The foamy, frothy tops of the crashing waves was made from Woodland Scenics flake snow mixed into clear resin (very heavily, mix a lot in!). This was really easy to paste on in big, dramatic clumps using a coffee stirrer or lolly stick... so I went massively overboard and overdid it again. Didn't want to waste any! Ah well, fantasy innit. For future reference, less is definitely more! That being said, the big sprays coming crashing up through the gaps in the columns is definitely atmospheric and fun.

Here are some of the biggest waves with their foamy, crashy crests. The translucency of the Fix All really makes the wave look convincing. Once I had pasted the foam in place I lightly sprinkled over the top with neat Woodland Scenics snow. I thought this would make it look a bit more granular and whiter but I don't actually think it added anything. If anything I actually think it looks less like froth, but not enough that I'll scrape it off and do it again.

Because the breakers on the beach were more pronounced than I had hoped I decided to add a big wave to explain them. Actually, if this is the same body of water that is being pummelled onto the basalt columns it doesn't make sense for it to be gently idling up the beach, so that works ok. The mega wave was built up in the same way as on the Salute board but this time I did it in 4 stages, blending each one into the last, so I could make it curve up and actually roll over with a channel underneath. The neat Fix All hardly sags at all when pulled into place so it wasn't to difficult to coax it all the way over without collapsing. I put another big splash of foam in where it's crashing down.

I went in with some white acrylic and painted in the foamy bits around the edges of the rocks. I did also finally get around to using a sepia ink to 'wet' the stone where the waves are crashing. Just need to go over it with a varnish and put the glisten back. 

So here are some shots of the board pretty much finished. If you'd like a more 3-dimensional view you can check out the video coming soon to my YouTube Channel and, of course come along to Salute or join us for The Woods In The Woods games day this year. Details to be announced soon.

Salute 2024... DEMO GAME BOARD PART 4-