Beaux bâtiments en normandie - part 1

To have a good miniatures game, you need rules, miniatures, a surface to play on, terrain, and various accouterments (dice/cards/counters/markers etc.).

For World War II skirmish games I had the first three, but was lacking the third. Since I knew that the forces I was collecting were roughly centered on "late war" and more specifically Normandy (with the paratroopers in the earlier uniforms), I thought that Northern France would be a good place to start.

Now, as you know, Normandy is about as well trod a war-gaming ground as you can find.  D-day, and the months following have built up about as much mythology as you can for something so recent, and of course the terrain itself lends itself to smaller actions, which are easier to war-game on the tabletop convincingly. (even if large actions lend themselves to greater historical accuracy...)

So Normandy terrain.

Fortunately as mentioned above this is a well hoed row, and there are plenty of inspiring builds out there.  In addition, there are plenty of commercially made items for sale, and a plenty of photo-graphical evidence as well, since both the Commonwealth and US armies were accompanied by photographers and other journalists.

A rational person, or at least one not so cheap as I am, would view the above, and then go to some MDF laser cut shop and buy a small village, customize that a bit, and move on.  Not being rational, and being cheap, I went another route:

Unfortunately I did not take any pictures of the first couple buildings at the early stages of construction, but here you can see on in progress to give you an idea of how these went.  Card stock carcass, card and paper details, and modeling putty "skin".   Other buildings got a skim coat of drywall jointing compound, and a couple got foam sheet stone work.

After a "few" hours we end up here:

Then it came time to do shingles...

I cut a bunch of these out on the Silhouette Cameo we have (as well as the windows, shutters and other details), but they covered only one half of one roof, and then I laboriously cut out most of the rest of the strips by hand.  As you might expect, making the same motion over and over again hundreds of times is not great for the ol'muscular-skeletal system, and with eight buildings to cover it took a long time. 

Scale check

The nice thing about old buildings is that they can be used in many eras...

Throughout this project I collected pictures on the internet and printed some of them out, made sketches, doodled in the margins of other things, and otherwise compared terrain to the actual thing.  Google street view came in handy as I "drove" around Normandy looking at old villages and farm roads. I even had my sister send me some vacation pictures she had taken from one of her trips to Normandy (brother-in-law is a Band of Brothers fanatic).

Lots more to come on these buildings!

To be continued:

Small preview

Small preview (although quite large if you click on the picture) of three projects. 

"Abdul Goldberg? I have a warrant for your arrest" 

Scratch Built Dropship

Sadly, not mine, but one I saw on Iron Mitten.

I really love the idea of taking "junk" and making something practical out of it, and since I have one of these same bottles at home, I was staring at it for a while in the shower this morning, thinking about how to make it into something useful for Inq28 or other WH40k/Generic Scifi sort of games.

Unfortunately I always start to get carried away, and I was thinking about blue foam shapes for the nose and tail, a chimera turret, vector engines, windows using disposable contact packets, and adding a layered styrene skin to have panels and exposed wiring... at a certain point I need to stop thinking and just make something.

(also see this post from the Marienburg Gazette)

On sculpting

I have been working a bit on the various Inquisitor figures I have going, and have been thinking about how much I need to work on my sculpting skills.  Most of the figures need at least filling before they are ready to be "finished", but some really need replaced hands, or resculpted pants, or similar, which currently exceeds my skill level. Fortunately I have been pretty satisfied with the various heads I have in my bitzbox, so no need to sculpt one yet, but I am sure it is coming some time.

So, I need to practice more, and here are some tips and tutorials that I have been collecting in support of this.  [and do not take these as any indication as to where my figures are going, they are just useful links!]

Tentacle/cable making with a comb: http://40kaddict.blogspot.com/2012/12/impromptu-tentacle-maker.html
Octopus style suckered tentacles: http://eyeoferror.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/sculpting-octopus-like-tentacles.html
Quick hands: http://commissar.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=conversion&action=display&thread=10322
Hand holding a spear or banner: http://xenite.wordpress.com/modeling-painting-and-hobby-articles/sculpting-hands-with-greenstuff/
Five minute hands: http://www.sciborminiatures.com/en_,sculpting.php?id=508#i/kwadrat/big/hand_tutorial_01.jpg
Sculpting Chain: http://www.underthecouch.net/tutorials/sculpting-chain/
Foil straps: http://maquette-garden.forumactif.com/t16914-tuto-fabrication-de-bretelles-d-armes-a-feu
Wreaths: http://www.underthecouch.net/tutorials/sculpting-wreath-badges/
Peaked Cap: http://colgravis.blogspot.com/2009/05/tutorial-sculpting-mordian-style-caps.html
Hood/Robes: http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/68547-modelling-green-stuff-templar-style-robe/
lettering: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/507091.page
http://www.rolljordan.com/pega/sculpting_tutorials/How_to_sculpt_letters.jpg
Head sculpting (larger scale) http://z11.invisionfree.com/Work_In_Progress/index.php?showtopic=15700
Hex headed bolts http://z11.invisionfree.com/Work_In_Progress/index.php?showtopic=16689
Power clamp arm http://z11.invisionfree.com/Work_In_Progress/index.php?showtopic=8086

In a related vein, I have been collecting a few images of useful conversions in my Pinterest. [which surprisingly has 13 followers now]

Pavements

Today in my Internet wanderings, I came across this lovely method from the Lazy Forger for making streets and sidewalks, using MDF.

Here are the relevant three parts:
1. Carving the cast lines and cracks
2. Sponge Painting
3. Sidewalks and detailing

I think that this technique could be combined with my eventual plan to make a 6 foot square 28mm City fight board, by having an MDF layer to represent roadways, and indeed it may be adaptable to blue foam as well. Since I own a table saw, making the relevant cuts should be simple.

Something to think about in the future.

Also, a warm welcome to Sean Robson, who like many excellent folks, is a paleontologist.  He also has a great blog mostly aimed at D&D, and has come up with a very handy format to present adventures, which I hope to utilize when I get around to finalizing the one I am working on for New Years.

Scratch Built Galley

Now, I am no Tony, but I think I had some success with this project.  A bit of background, a while back, I finished reading Empires of the Sea, and got inspired to look into naval gaming with galleys.  Finding that the available options for galleys were rather expensive, I thought I would try my hand at scratch building a galley.  Following some Internet research, I decided to base the scale on the size of a common Popsicle stick, which happens to be 1cm in width.  This translated to a ship of around 8.5cm in length for an approximate scale of 1/510.  This size also fits neatly on a plastic credit card, which I happen to have a ton of from gift cards and hotel room keys.

After a few afternoons and evenings of work, I had the following results:

Needs, paint, but I think it is on the right track.
I think that I can create more of these pretty quickly, which would be good, since there were over 400 ships at Lepanto...