Warhammer Forests

Forests, all games need them but they've got to be adapted for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. With some games coming up I decided to grab my styrene cut out a base and get started. I have a few factors to consider when making these forests. Number one is that I have to store them at the club and space is limited. I want mine to both look like difficult terrain but to also be practical for gameplay. Finally I want them to look good. The aesthetics  of the game are very important to me, I would be playing boardgames or chess if not. I also want these to be useable for a few different systems so I can't go too wild and just fill the bases with skulls or other very specific Warhammer items, though I snuck a few in here and there!

The most important thing is playability and to that end I bases the trees individually on old flight stands so that they can be removed during the game if units need to access the interior of the forest. The area of the forest is defined by the base of the whole terrain piece so the placement of individual trees doesn't matter as much. The trees are made from the Woodland Scenics kits. I used the small armatures and the olive green foliage. It is really easy system. I use PVA to make sure that the foliage remains on during the rigours of gaming. The benefit of the smaller trees is that they really look like they block line of sight but they are also a lot easier to store at the club. I actually have quite a hodgepodge of trees here. Some were done in the early 2000's while others were done recently. I redid the basing where possible to match but there are some discrepancies.

As forests are so ubiquitous on gaming tables I made two. I will make a few larger ones next. For the bases themselves I added some airdrying clay to the main base to give it some weight and to help balance out the bases as I tend to add a lot of details. I try and get as much texture on these as possible, so rocks, fallen branches and even a few mushrooms. The air drying clay helps embed these in the terrain and also helps even things out so that movement trays aren't sliding around when in the terrain. It also protects some of the little details by offering them some sheltered beside bulkier things.

Fields for Warhammer and other Wargames

It's been a while, a long while. I decided to post here again to document the process of me making some fields for tabletop wargaming simply because there weren't many posts out there that really covered what I wanted in a tutorial. Oh don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good examples I'm sure. Its just that I couldn't find one easily and I can't be bothered looking on YouTube as its just filled with advertisements and clickbait.

The Project:

I want to create a few small to medium sized fields using the Warhammer Walls and Fences kits I've had for over a decade. I want these to really look good on the table but I also want to have removable crops in them so that regiments can be placed inside.

It might not sound too difficult but my friend Steve set the challenge to have the crops removable and that's thrown quite a spanner in the works. Do I have the entire crop lift out at once? Seems the easiest to do but it'll look poor once units are in there and suddenly the field is bare. Maybe it is better to divide the inside into irregular shapes that will fill it and can be lifted out as required though it shouldn't be either too regular or a jigsaw puzzle. I'll need to get a field put together and work with some scraps of paper to decide on what might work. I guess one large irregular piece and then some smaller irregular ones to go around it will probably be the most adaptable.

Then I have to think about what crop. I was going to go with the ubiquitous wheat crop but I'll need to see what the closest DIY shop has on offer, judge its quality and work from there. I could just do something a little different like cabbages but I am really unsure about how to approach that.

My first task therefore is to build the fields by getting a base adding the walls and painting all that up. Then I can look at what'll fit in and how it might look once it is finished. Also if you are reading this: thanks. Let me know in a comment just so I don't get the feeling I am shouting into the void.

Necromunda Walkway

I showed you my WIP Necromunda building last week and now I'll show you one of the walkways that I mentioned in the article. It isn't totally finished either but it is very close to being so. I reduced the height of the Sector Mechanicum supports that GW make as I felt they were a little too high for the game. I wanted my gang to be able to scale ladders and run for cover in the same move rather than barely get up the ladder in the first place. I also wanted to be able to have more multi-level pieces without having to go really high. I achieved that nicely here with the half level which fits perfectly with this piece I made earlier. Again once this piece is finished I'll make a video and show it off. It doesn't need much more work so you'll see it sooner than last weeks building.

Necromunda Building 1

Sometimes I wonder why I start certain projects, this building is very much one of them. All seemed reasonable as I started but soon the error of my ways was revealed! It is hard to dedicate a lot of time to a single project and it is even harder to keep up motivation once the project is started.
As I have slowly been building up my section of the underhive I felt that I needed a proper building that could occupy a moderate chunk of the table, blocking line of sight, offering cover and give the walkways I have been working on something to connect to. Making a solid building with the Sector Mechanicum pieces just wasn't going to work, the time invested in making the pieces and then painting them was too high and so I turned to the bulkhead walls that come with the base Necromunda set to help me out. I cast the pieces for the ground floor and started painting them up. The repetitive nature of them was fine as I guess this is an industrial building and as such would be made without much thought to pleasing aesthetics.

I painted them ´with a little more weathering than usual, this helped to hide the few mistakes I made in casting the first few bulkheads. It is always a process to learn how to demould these to keep the details intact but also to get the correct amount of plaster into the mould fast enough before it starts to set. That can cause breaks in the piece that seem to only reveal themselves when it comes to getting the piece out of the mould. The heavy weathering also keeps the piece from being too colourful on the gaming table and distracting from the action which should always be in the foreground. The weathering is mainly washes and a little Typhoid Corrosion from GW to give some texture to the rust.

I don't want the building to be too tall as I can't store them as easily then. Also I don't think it benefits game play when the buildings are too tall. It impedes access to certain areas of the board, makes determinations of line of sight difficult and also gives long range weaponry a slight advantage. I don't see the confines of the underhive really containing massively tall structures except in very limited circumstances. I reduced the foot print on the first floor of the building to allow playable access to it. The walkways that go over this level will extend out just as far as the ones below providing some shelter and be at the perfect height to meet the walkways I have started work on.

The painting of these structures takes me an age. I think I put a little too much effort into the first ones I built and now I feel like I have to match it across them all. Don't get me wrong, the effort is definitely worth it in terms of how the finish piece looks on the table. Its just that the sheer volume of the surface alone takes a while to cover solidly in paint and then going in to do the details is a whole other Sisyphean effort. I have cast the final pieces for this piece namely the walkway on the top. I haven't however gotten any further than you see here and it could be a long time before more progress is made. I'll film a video then and show it off. Fingers crossed it is sooner rather than later!

Old West Tents

I've been working away on some Old West terrain for a while. As I am slowly building a complete town with a friend we need quite a lot of terrain. While buildings are fun to do we also need some more scatter style pieces. As the town represents a rapidly growing gold rush location we felt that some more temporary accommodation might be fitting. Having looked at the Dead Wood series we came to the idea that tents would be a common feature of towns like this as people arrive but can't afford to build a house straight away or live indefinitely in a boarding house. I tried making my own to varied success and finally felt that the effort wasn't worth it for the result and so I went in search of some alternatives online.

Renendra make some very nice generic tent pieces for a very decent price and as luck would have it when I went to order they were running a sale on exactly what I wanted. I think these are called dog tents and as they are very plain and simple they will work in almost any genre that I play. The scale is a little on the small size so for heroic 32mm scale they wouldn't suit but for everything else around the 28mm size these are perfect. I added some crates and barrels to the bases to add a little weight and some variance among the tents. I think I purchased eight in total and as there are only two varieties the additional pieces on the base helps differentiate them. I kept the painting simple with a stippled canvas colour.

Shardwrack Spines

I am trying to make a set of terrain specifically for Age of Sigmar based around the Runis of Fellan. This is an area of my own devising and is basically a once glorious city ruined at the outset of the Age of Chaos and now overgrown. To that end I picked up some Shardwrack Spines to add to the set so that I could replace my more mundane trees with something a little more fantastical. I wasn't entirely convinced when I got them out of the box that they would be nice. The garish paint scheme that these are shown in might suit a 40k deathworld but it didn't suit the vegetation that I was envisaging for my ruins. I decided to paint these in a more muted and natural scheme to enforce some more realism on what are very unrealistic plants. I think it worked out well.

These are base coated in Skavenblight Dinge (GW). Somehow I managed to pick up two pots of this and in an attempt to use it I've been painting a lot of things with it. Its a very dirty grey and this looks great for trees and plants. I lightly drybrushed this with Sea Grey (VJ) and washed it with Athonian Camoshade (GW). This green brown wash really brought the tree to life as it added a perfect narural bark colour to it. All I had to do then was pickout the pustules/fungi on the surface. These make the model a little too Nurgle looking but I think when they are painted rather more neutral they can look quite natural. Only the big ones ruin the effect I think. These I actually painted yellow and then highlighted them with Bleached Bone (VJ) to wash out the colour a little.

All in all I think the model came out great and I'll slowly be doing more of these over the coming weeks to replace the forest trees I have while I am waiting for the next round of Azyrite Ruins to be released.

Azyrite Ruins

I’m slowly getting some terrain done for Age of Sigmar. I’ve been eyeing up the Azyrite Ruins kit since it came out and I finally grabbed one last week. The kits great, not quite as modular as I’d have liked but good enough to get some variation in the final pieces. Of course I couldn’t just do a simple build I had to complicate it. I saw somewhere online that somebody had built a realm gate in with the kit and as I don’t have a realm gate yet this seemed a good way to make a unique looking one. This is still very much a WIP but hopefully I can get it finished in the next few days.

Sector Mechanicus Pt.1

I've finally managed to get working on my Necromunda and 40k terrain. Here is a short video showing the first of many buildings I'll be working on over the coming weeks. I've a campaign coming up, well a few actually, and I need terrain for them. With that in mind I've been beavering away trying to get a prototype done.

I don't know much about videos so this one might be a little poor in quality. I don't seem to be able to get it to display correctly but I'll persevere and make improvements as I keep making these.

Casting 40k Terrain: Initial Tests

With the New 40k coming out and the imminent release of Necromunda, I've found myself needing some terrain. I bought a Ferratonic Incinerator but I quickly realised that this wasn't going to go far in covering a 4x4 table, never mind a 6x4. I can't really justify spending the amount of money I'd need to buy all the sets. So instead I had planned on making my own terrain. I bought a few builts to scratch build panels I could cast but to be honest they just weren't coming out as well as I'd hoped. After wondering what to do I thought that maybe I'd try casting some of the pieces from the sets I had. In the picture you can see where I made a few holes in the casts. This was as a result of not having mixed the Stewalin plaster at the right ratio and probably demoulding it too quickly.

I bought some silicone and Stewalin plaster. I have used the plaster and the silicone before while maing some scatter terrain for the Old West. You can expect a post on that at a later point. To make the mould I just followed one of the plethora of videos online. It was really simple and worked a charm, though next time I might break them into single pieces as that way I can judge what I need to cast them better and also I don't have a huge amount of working time with the Stewalin and it taes a lot of time to work it into a mould this highly detailed. Anyway I have to approach this project as a learning process. I haven't moulded or cast anything like this before.

This is a picture of the mould. As you can hopefully make out its pretty detailed. It is 100% bubble free which is impressive. The crevices are deep and tight yet the silicone was able to flow into them. I used an electric toothbrush as a vibration device which wasn't very effective. It seems I didn't need it or it was far more effective than I thought it was. The plan for this project is to make a few low structures with walkways connecting them. I'm going to keep them fairly modular for storage purposes. I'm going to concentrate on getting a  single structure done and then I'll know better how to get these mass produced quickly. Just as a note to the curious: I won't be selling, trading or otherwise giving away the moulds or the casts I make from them, please don't ask. The purpose of this blog post is to show whats possible and to track my progress.

 

Railroad Terrain

Railroad terrain looks great on a Warmachine or Malifaux board and despite the fact I don't play those games offline anymore I still want to get these pieces painted up. These railway pieces have been lying around in my cabinet for a long time and so I pulled them out and finished them off. This piece represents a flood relief section. I am not sure how accurate it is but I think breaks in the raised bed of the track are made to allow floodwaters to pass through rather than have them erode the bed. It also offers some good tactical opportunities. The bridge section is wide enough to allow a Heavy Warjack to move along it.It is important that the piece is as fully playable as possible and I think I achieved that.

I should have done the weathering a little different. I think the salt method I have done on other projects would have worked better. This is fine and I am not going to change it but next time I will use the salt method. I need to put some vegetation on these pieces still but I am lazy at the moment and as I won't be playing with them soon they are fine to go into the cabinet. When I come eventually to use them I will get the flock out.

Currently I have three foot long sections completed and I will need a fourth as the railroad does have to cross the board. I am not sure though what to do for the fourth piece. I have been thinking of a shed sitting over the track. I have also been thinking of a tunnel but building a cliff face has kind of put me off. I have thought about building one before as a sort of table dressing, something to sit on the edge of the board and look nice. The main problem is storage space for something like that. There is no way it could be small and I already struggle to keep my gaming collection in a somewhat organised state. I am however going to build a railway station.

Witchfate Tor Part 1

I bought this model at the same time as the Dreadstone Blight. I pretty much instantly regretted the decision as I bought them without paying any attention to the pictures. Once it arrived I realised that they are more or less the same model with an additional layer on top.I put it together last year but didn't do much with it. I decided the other day that leaving it on top of my display cabinet gathering dust probably wasn't getting the best use out of it even if it is an impressive dust magnet. With that in mind and the strong possibility of an Age of Sigmar campaign coming up in the next few months I decided to get this piece done. I will approach it a level at a time working from the top down. I went with Averland colours as that represents my opponents colour scheme and offers a decent contrast. The darker stone work had already been painted so I went back and painted a lighter stone colour. So far this is what I have managed. Only three more levels and a base to do, that can't take too long right?

Wargames Building Pt. 4

I am making really slow progress on this building due to not really having all the material I need. Today I picked up some thinner balsa and I was able to get the tiles done on the veranda roof. I measured them all out at 1cm intervals but due to the difficulty of keeping them all aligned there is a good bit of variability in them which is fine. I glued a sheet of paper down and I added the tiles on top of this. I also added the first section of the removable roof. To make any more progress I need to get this building based. I will go on the hunt tomorrow for some plasticard. Hopefully I can find some that's at a decent price.

Wargames Building pt. 3

After many hours of cutting and gluing here is the result. This part of the building is the easiest as there really isn't anything complicated to do. The windows aren't finished yet in the back. I have to let the glue dry a little more before I can get some wood in there for the frames. I haven't figured out how I am going to join the stone chimney which is fairly irregular to the rest of the structure without leaving a lot of gaps. I am hoping it won't prove too difficult. I also need to pick up some thinner wood as the thickness I am currently using isn't right for the tiles. I need a thickness of about .5mm and I have one of 1.5mm. Hopefully one of the cafes around here has some coffee stirrers that are the right size.

Lots of Trees

I have been busily building more trees. I really want to get a good few of these done as they look excellent, especially en masse. I have another fourteen to do here in Hamburg still and twelve I intend to bring back from Ireland next time I am home. Thirty six to forty eight of these spread around a board is probably a little too much but I am figuring that especially with Malifaux which uses a 3'x3' board the extras can serve as dressing along one side. I had considered building a small cliff face to go down one side and while I still might it would be annoying to store.

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.

Lost in the Bogs

Since my recent game of SAGA at home I have been building some terrain. During the game we talked about eventually recreating the Battle of Hastings but that we would need some boggy terrain for it. I had been thinking about creating some so a while. Most swamp terrain for wargames is based on the american bayou rather than bogs or marshes. I think the swamp terrain is fine but often it looks more like a pool than anything else. With that in mind I set about a test piece creating a bog somewhat similar to that I used to live near.The dominant thing I remember was the broken nature of the ground with thin but deep cracks everywhere. The ground was actually higher than the dry areas around it as the water it contained caused it to swell. Heather was the dominant plant at least in terms of coverage. There was not really much water pooled everywhere but this was due to the fact that the bog was worked and drained in the main places I could access.

I tried to incorporate all of the above in the piece you see here. I used a CD as a base asI don't currently have better basing material. Using wood on this would have made it way too tall in the end. The CD is a perfect thinness for basing and I have used them fairly often before. I put some air drying modelling clay on top of this. I sculpted it with some texture tools I have made. This gives a nice rough texture to the clay and visually separates it from the normal sand flocked surface. It also serves to raise the surface gently. Painting was simple, a layer of black and then some dark browns over the top. I added a few pools to the piece to indicate that it is a water feature. These aren't finished yet but I used a high quality gloss varnish to fill them. It is a slow process as I can only add a very thin layer at a time. For finishing the piece I added various plants. In the light of the photograph these are quite bright but generally they don't look quite so stark. A few grass tufts to break up the flock worked perfectly and with that the piece was finished.

I am happy with how it came out. I would like to get one or two other plants to add to the piece. Maybe a flower tuft or something in that direction. I can't really use a plant similar to heather despite the fact that I have figured out how to make them. It wold be impossible to move miniatures onto the piece with them there and making them removable would be too much of a headache.

More Trees

With the recent games at my house I noticed I am missing a few standard terrain pieces. Having moved from Ireland I left a lot of what I had behind and that included the rather difficult to transport collection of trees I have. I have two small trees here that I use as part of a spell template for Hordes. So with that in mind I sat down and started to put together some of the pieces I have here. They are Woodland Scenics frames with their weird sponge cover stuff added. Foliage is probably the name but I am not sure. Anyway These actually take some time to put together but they are worth it. There are few relatively cheap trees on the market that look this good. Back in Ireland I have two full packets of the largest trees put together and I guess I will have to bring them back here once I get the chance.

I base these for the moment on individual flying bases from GW. I don't think these are available anymore so I will eventually have to swap to something else. I sculpted some rocks on these ones so that they are a little less plain looking. A few plants in the form of various flocks and even a sapling makes up the rest of the added detail. I usually then put these down onto another base that denotes the edge of the forest so that the tres can be moved around as much as is needed during battle. I have a good few more of these to get through and I need to get some more foliage stuff. I prefer the lighter coloured one and hopefully I can find it here easily enough. I guess one of the train shops should have some Woodland Scenic stock. I am also working on some relatively simple boggy ground. I will hopefully get that finished over the weekend so I can post it here on Monday.

Hitting a Brick Wall

Linear Obstacles in Warmachine seem to be a rather popular piece of terrain and I thought I would try out making one. I wanted to do a quick mock up to see what could be achieved and this here is the result. I wanted it to tie in fairly well with the other terrain pieces I have so I went with bricks. Using bricks allowed me to thicken the wall a little bit more than if I used some other materials. I wanted the wall to emulate the template provided for these in the rule book. So it should be three quarters of an inch thick. This prevents models without reach from attacking over it for instance. The length was determined by the piece of plasticard I had left. It is about four and a half inches long.

I capped the piece with metal as this again ties in really well with the other terrain pieces. My rust technique didn't really work here as I had to be much more careful than normal. The foam I make the walls from dissovles if the turpentine I use for the pigments hits them. I wasn't able to slather on the washes as I usually would. I think I will tone down the rust for the finished pieces when I get around to making them. I have a few other projects I want to do first. The biggest one of them is getting the railroad pieces done. I finally ordered the sand I need to complete them and once it arrives is will be getting back to them.

One thing that does annoy me a little is random wall syndrome. I like a realistic battlefield. Randome walls have no place on one. They make no sense even though they are fine for the game. If I do more pieces I am thinking I will make them as some sort of a fixed size enclosure. It would represent a storage yard or the like. I think walls like the above shown one might be a little too much for agricultural purposes! I haven't decided yet but I think a terrain piece like this can work.

Watchtower finally done!

It seems like an age since I started this project. Thankfully it is now completely finished. I really just needed to get my airbrush going to that I could do the weathering I wanted and after that it was simple. The green colour is to match my Khadoran scheme. Now they have something to defend at least!The colour somehow blecds in with the aged wood which wasn't what I wanted at all. I thought it might offer a better contrast when finished. It looks good, just different from what I expected. I did apply a 'filter' of brown over the green and this may have caused the blending. A filter is a very dilute wash with pigments that is worked after drying to simulate something like dust or dirt. I haven't really experimented much with it but I imagine it would be a very interesting technique to use on the colossal I guess I will soon be painting.

I thought that the tower might look a little boring in just the plain green and brown so I added this symbol to one of the sides. I cut a stencil from some stiff paper and used the airbrush to paint it on. I wasn't very succesful as the airbrush applied the paint more thinnly than I would have prefered. I was able to touch it up for the most part. It looked horrible before the weathering but now it looks just as old as the rest of the surface around it. I didn't draw the stencil as exactly as I should have but at least for next time I will know what to do.

To differentiate the entrance from the other sides better I added a barrel. You would think a door would be enough but adding a barrel always helps! I picked these up on a whim in a local games store and I like using them on terrain as it adds a little character. The cd base I was using doesn't fit snug to the walls of the tower so adding this filled up a lot of that empty space I think. I didn't weather the entrance side too much in case I add more stuff to it later. I doubt I will but it is a little plain. A shield or something on the wall might be nice.

If you want to see some of the WIP shots of my progress on this you can see them here and here.