Compagnie Franches de la Marine

This is a WIP for my Compagnie Franches de la Marine for Muskets & Tomahawks. I picked some up at the Tactica fair here last weekend. I think I have enough for a 300pt game now. I just need to get painting. I am not investing too much effort into these as to get them to look good would take a lot of effort as white isn't the easiest to paint. The models are also not great. The standard historical standard which is poor. I am hoping that they will at least look good en-masse.

Canadian Militia

I have nailed my colours to the mast and they are white. Here are the first of my Canadian Militia for Muskets & Tomahawks. The models were a christmas gift from a friend. With all models I get that are gifts I try to paint them as soon as possible. There is little point in giving someone a gift if they don't or won't do anything with it. I have four more to go and they are at least base coated. I am going to go with a militia force at the start as I like the scenarios they usually play. I will have a smattering of various other models though and this depends on what is available at Tactica at the end of the month. I will probably pick up some stuff from Warlord games but I am eager to find some other interesting models I can use.

Wargames Building pt.2

I took a while to figure out what I would use to build the chimney section of the building. I finally settled with some air drying modelling clay. I usually don't like the stuff and for this type of building it really isn't that good. However as I had nothing else I just went with it. The problem is that it dries and shrinks. I couldn't really glue it before it dried and so it was likely to fall apart once I started doing anything with it. To over some this I added some reinforcing wire into the corners. I built the entire chimney in four sections and joined them together once everything was dry. Using the plan from the last post I could maintain the scale I wanted despite working in four sections at once.

Once each section was close to dry I painted the joins with a coloured watered down PVA glue. This gave enough support that once everything was 100% dry I could apply a stronger glue. I only had one or two problems where the bricks I had made weren't glued but I could get them back into place easily enough. Again once this was done I got busy filling the tiny gaps in. There were loads. The clay shrinks a lot and so I added in small stones to cover the holes left behind. As these were small the dried really quickly and so by the time I was finished the last face I could already glue the ones into the first face. I covered everything in a dark brown paint at this stage and also sprayed some black up through the centre so that the white of the clay was no longer showing. When these coats were dry I used a thick gloss varnish to hopefully prevent the inevitable chipping from coming up with the original white. I guess the building shouldn't recieve too much wear and tear. I don't play at home that often. However the removable roof will probably cause some wearing so the gloss varnish is a good way to try to stop that.

Here is the chimney finished. It looks a little more grey in the photos than in actuality. I went with a few colours for the base coat, mainly a very dark brown. I added some grey to this and then highlighted with some Bleached Bone (GW) additions. I washed it with a little green in places and then some dark brown to bring out a little of the texture. As you can see in the profile as I went on with the building the stones got smaller and thinner. It is definitely something I would do if I was to repeat the process. The larger squared stones don't look as good as the thinner ones. I tried to mix the sizes but I could definitely have done with using more of the smaller ones. I will eventually have to build a second building in the same size for Muskets & Tomahawks. The game demands them and the minimum number is two. I was half thinking of building it completely in stone but that would take too long. I might use this technique to do the lower floor in stone and then the top half in wood. Using small thin stones I think I could get it to look quite good. Now I have to start building the rest of the house.

Wargames Buildings pt.1

I have been building a few buildings recently and I thought I might show a step by step of exactly the process I use when building them. I don't tend to get too complicated with what I do. Mostly I rely on the lessons learned from an old White Dwarf article from issue 130. I don't know if many of you will remember that exact issue but it thought me the basics of constructing a building. Despite searching I can't find a picture of the cottage.

To begin with I usually construct a single wall of the building. Once I get to this point I realise that I need a plan and so I start sketching ideas. For this building I want it to be primarily used for Muskets & Tomahawks but I would like to be able to use it for other systems. I knew then that I would be going for a French Indian Wars style with a wooden veranda and stone chimney stack. This picture from 4ground buildings is an excellent example of what I want to build. They also have some interesting information on styles of building in this period so they were an invaluable resource when it came to doing this project. There must be a good book on the subject but I can't find it. Now that I know what I should be doing I can get busy cutting the balsa to make the rest of the walls.