back to school! (sigh!!!)

I can't really complain as I have had a good summer holiday.  It has been quite productive in terms of painting figures, building scenery for my city and restarting my blog.  This last few days of holiday have been quite quiet in terms of what I have managed to achieve.  I have had to focus more on getting ready for work and my wife decided that the bedroom needed decorating before I went back!  Not the sort of painting I was hoping to do.
Anyway, all was not lost as I still found time to complete a couple of things for my campaign.
Carrying on with the Hasslefree survivors, I managed to complete another two.  First up is Katie, another child figure.  Armed with a baseball bat and a dustbin lid, she should be able to hold her own for a round or two if need be.  I painted her in a similar 'school uniform' colour palate to her brother ( see previous post for peter.)

 A nice, quick model to paint and a useful addition to the pool of possible encounters for my game.

 The second of my two new additions is Beth, another Hasslefree miniature.  Another nice, general figure but strangely not one that inspires a 'must use' character.  Still, I suppose she will turn up somewhere.

The other thing I managed to complete was another building.  This time it was the abandoned warehouse.  Quite a simple model and quite quick to build, and the best of all, it was a free pdf from Stoelzel's structures!!

 It is the type of building that will see a lot of use in an urban game board as many places have disused buildings.  I might even make another of them to create an abandoned area of town.

 The inside is very straight forward.  It is completely empty except a set of stairs.  I have to admit that I hate building stairs in model buildings!! :(

 first floor is pretty much the same as the ground floor, as in it's empty!

 The roof has an access way for characters to get up there and escape the zombie as undead can't climb ladders :)

 There were 3 different ways of constructing the building.  The option I chose was the layer method, which allows easier access to the bottom of the building for games.

Although I am planning more buildings in the near future (in fact I purchased some more files this week!!)  I am going to run into some storage issues very soon.  These are the shelves that the foam buildings are stored on and they are getting very full.  Might need to sort out another option soon!

I am thinking that I need to paint something other than survivors next as I am a little jaded with them.  I have a couple of figures almost finished and then after them I will paint a few other things, more of which, hopefully, next post.
Until next time....

town clutter

I am still trying to think of modern city clutter for survivors or superheroes to use for cover.  My latest attempt was to build some builders skips.  These are built to a British pattern which means my final city will be a strange mixture of European/American cultures but I am sure I can live with that!

 First I created a 'net' out of paper and when i was convinced the sides lined up to give me the basic shape I wanted, I traced it onto card and cut it out.

 I then reinforced the sides with strips of plasticard.  This took the most amount of time of the whole project!

Finally I painted them.  I made 4 all together.  The photos make them look a little rougher round the edges than they do in real life.. I suppose that I could have made the sides of plasticard as well but this would have increased the difficulty and construction time and I am very flighty at the moment!

I think that they dont look too bad and again they cost me nothing to make as all materials were already lying around my desk.  I look forward to actually using them in a game.  Just need to think of what to make next!?!?!

Although my first few posts (since returning to blogging) have been about my super heroes, one of my main projects is to create a town/city terrain that can be a setting for a few game ideas I have.  One of my (very!) early blog entries was about painting zombies, which I went on to finish - I will post pics at some point.  With these I hope to play some games of 'all things zombies' by twohourwargames.  Having 70 or so zombies is all well and good but I also needed survivors and a set of terrain.  I recently played out a solo game of superheroes and realised that although the buildings looked good, there was too much empty space.  so I set out to create some cover other than big buildings.
first up was a small memorial park.
the following pictures go step wise through the construction process.

The basis was a square of mdf and plasticard beds.  The level of the beds was raised with card inserts.

As the terrain road tiles I am using are from Stoetzels paper buildings I printed paving and brickwork to clad the floor and walls. The beds were given a layer of hot glue and then pva and sand to create the soil surface.

The sand was inked when dry and plants/ vegetation attached.

 Next benches were constructed from balsa wood and more plasticard and card used to create the centre piece.  The figure is an old foundry Victorian gentlemen figure that I had spare and the shields are from empire knights (games workshop)

 The benches were inked green and glued in place.

lastly, the centre piece was painted bronze, given a green wash and highlighted while the stone plinth was given coats of grey.

Overall I'm quite pleased with how it worked out.  It does what I set out to do and that is to provide a piece of terrain that creates cover in an open area.  Even more pleasing was that it was made entirely out of bits and pieces I had to hand so in effect cost nothing to build (wargamer's logic on display a bit there!)
I have a few more ideas for battlefield clutter and so will be making a few more bits and pieces soon.