Catching up

With the social distancing in effect, I've done some more hobbying that usual in the past weeks...

The start of the medieval farmstead that I built ages ago has finally had it's date with the airbrush and paintbrush, just basing/flocking remains to be done:

I've also been assembling a core force of  Space Wolves, which required some greenstuffing:

In the meanwhile, in the background I was printing stuff. Unfortunately I suffered a major clog in the print head.This forced me to fully disassemble and clean the hot end, as well as replace the bowden tubing... After several days (over several weeks) of tweaking, I have it running reliably again.

But the major endeavour of this month has been two buildings for my Cyberpunk terrain project. They still have some small touches to do (matt varnish, windows and the till on the store interior still needs to be painted), but for the moment, they're finished enough. Both have accessible interiors and locations where signage can be magnetically attached.

The front door is reversible, with a regular door and a quarantine door. :)

 The 3-story building is 3D printed, with some scratch-built additions, the shop is from large scale train terrain. Graffiti and tags are decals (home printed), posters and signs are printed paper, while the magnetized signage is all 3d-printed.

As I was airbrushing a lot anyway, I decided to paint up this little thing as well:

I've also started up a new set of meads. The theme for this batch is "pear". 

Centre is a pear melomel, made by adding chopped pears to the mead recipe, the rightmost is a pear-cyser, made by substituting the water in the mead recipe with pear juice. The leftmost is just whatever pear juice, pear bits and honey I had left over from the other two batches. ;)
(They're in buckets because I tend to have a fairly energetic fermentation the first few days, and I like to contain the spillage.)

See you next time!

Stonewalling...

This weekend I've been making drystone walls for my 14th century medieval/fantasy village project.
After viewing a few tutorials on Youtube, I decided to go the "gravel and PVA in a mould" route:

A traditional Dwarven breakfast porridge. :D

Put it into a mould with some baking paper:

Leave to thoroughly dry and harden and you have:

Dwarven Granola Bars! :D

I had to do a quick test layout:

Need to fill some gaps on the undersides, but this will work nicely!

Time to get basing!

And a little farm setup with the Perry Miniatures medieval cottage.  Just need to stick some pigs in the wattle pen, cows or corn in the stonewalled fields.
I still need to build one or two wooden gates, as these will probably used for sheep/cow meadows. And then I can start painting this batch!

After that I want to add a chicken coop, some veggie gardens and a midden pile, and then I think I can call this first farm complete. Maybe some random tools and farm implements as scatter terrain.

See you next time!

Doing a bit of World-building

So, been a few weeks since last post, and I've been doing some stuff, so it's high time I shared it with you:

I've started on my Super-Battleship for Battlefleet Gothic (the vessel in the background is a Retribution Class Battleship. The largest class of official ship models for the game...) 

Once fully built, the Super-Battleship will have a double gun deck. It's a bit smaller than some Super-Battleship conversions/scratch builds out there, but I think this size to be a bit more believable.

I've also been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and so got inspired to pick at my Medieval/Fantasy Village again. I prepped and primed my villagers and livestock.

Hopefully somewhere in the future I'll be able to get them painted as well... ;) And build the village for them to live in... I think I have all the materials by now, just need to keep up the momentum/enthusiasm and hunker down for a few weekends. Unfortunately, all weekends for the coming month and a half have been booked full...

But the biggest thing I did the past few weekends is a set of planets and moons for BFG. An airbrush makes amazingly quick work of painting entire planets!

As you can see from the various views, they all come with a day and night side, to more easily show the sunward edge of the gaming table. 

 "Morning"

"Day"

"Evening"

"Night"

My gaming buddies are still focussed on playing a BFG campaign later this year, so these hopefully see use soon. One needs to refurbish a fleet, and the two others want to build/collect their own fleet from scratch, which is a bit of a challenge. Luckily, if they can't get it all together in time, I've got plenty of fleet(s) for them to loan for the time being. 

So, that's everything caught up again. I'll  likely be hobbbying a bit less the coming weeks, due to, as I said a busy calendar, and I really should start studying for a certification at work. But such is life.
See you next time!

I'm gonna have me some fun...

As I said in my Photobucket gripe post, it was my birthday last week and my wife gave me a Proxxon Thermocut (she loves me, she really does!).
Almost immediately I ordered some supplemental tools from GeBoom at Shifting Lands through a friend. That friend showed up yesterday for a game of Gaslands with those cutting aids.
As they are laser-cut mdf they required some assembly.
Well, some assembly was done today:

(As you can see Geboom also threw in some of his lasercut windows, as a teaser. Thank you!)

Assembly was easy, but you have to pay some attention to orientation of parts (I only messed up on the first one, resulting in the large fence being a bit tilted, but nothing that will interfere with proper functioning.)
Once assembled, they are nice and solid. As with the wirecutter itself, using these guides will take some practice and development of skill. But I'm looking forward to finally getting to grips with that pack of XPS I've had in the garage for years...

So what are the plans? First off: Dungeons, naturally,  as I haven't painted that pile of dungeoneers and monsters over the past two years for nothing! I've stalled on dungeon terrain for a long time, as I couldn't get the accuracy of cuts I wanted by hand. Now, I have no excuse, but I need to figure out seriously how I want to go about building my dungeon terrain first. Do I go with floor plates and loose walls, do I build individual corridor sections and rooms, or do I go with modular tiles?
No longer are these thoughts idle daydreams...

Then there is the idea of building a fantasy medieval village for my Chivalry project (itself part of the larger dungeoneering/fantasy meta-project). Having the cutter will open up the option of making some stone buildings and maybe even a keep or castle for my young lord!

Ofcourse, anything I build for dungeoneering or the chivalry game, will also find use in Frostgrave.

Necromunda as well, as I was envisioning a number of concrete butresses/pillars where gangways and shanty towns were built against their surfaces.

Lots of ideas that can finally become reality!

Yet, oddly enough, it is most likely I will grab my old hand-held foamcutter the coming weekends instead, as I intend to build some Mad-Max style desert wasteland terrain for Gaslands... Ironic really, I've been lusting after this foam cutter for years, and now that I finally have it, I grab the tool that has been in my garage for years. Oh well..

See you next time!

P.S. Still working on downloading all my pics from Photobucket to restore this blog, but PB is fighting me every step of the way....

First half of the Pavesiers done.

So, here they are:

 Scruffy townsfolk behind bright colourful shields... Medieval working class warriors, of sorts.

Here's their banner:

The symbol on the blue streamer that forms the top of the flag is a crossed mash paddle and ladle, signifying that this unit of militia consists of members of the Brewers Guild. (Each guild in a medieval city, which my fantasy setting is heavily influenced by, was obliged to be able to arm their membership and so provide units of militia for the city's defence and policing and to fulfill military obligations to feudal lords that controlled the city. The units would be equipped according to the wealth and status of the guild in question.) The Brewers Guild, not being exceptionally wealthy or poor, but being a large guild (as beer was the main drink of the era), provides the pavisiers in my setting. As you can see the more well-off members have better gear and more important duties within the guild militia.

And here's the pavise of the bannerman:

The captain/guildmaster will get a similar shield, but with a canton (inset) bearing a golden tree on a black field.

About that heraldry: The shield designs aren't just chosen at random or for prettyness. There are some references in there I'd like to share.
The heraldry on the majority of pavises and the banner is the heraldry of Rivia, a sovereignty in the setting of the Witcher, from Andrzej Sapkowski's books and CD Project Red's Witcher game trilogy. My littly geeky tribute to books and games that I love.
Just this week I discovered, by accident, that this is also the heraldry of a historical Dutch family called Zael or Zael Utteneng. Who apparently held lands or office along a part of disputed territories between two Duchies in the Holy Roman Empire, one of which now forms my home province Brabant. Funny that. I just love it when such coincidences pop up!

The rest are nods to regional history:
The red three-towered castle on a white field is the medieval version of the arms of the Quarter of Oisterwijck, the 14th century administrative/feudal domain my home city was part of back then.
 The gold tree on a black field, that I will paint as a canton on the militia captain his shield, was the medieval version of the arms of the Mairie of 'S-Hertogenbosch, the larger feudal (sub)domain within the Duchy of Brabant that the Quarter of Oisterwijck fell under.

Not the proper/historical way this heraldry would be used, but hey, I'm playing a fantasy game here... ;)

See you next time!

Pavises in Progress

Today, I spent some time at the painting table, here are the results:

What's left to do on these? Just some highlights on the red parts of the heraldry, the addition of symbols of the Brewers Guild (crossed mash paddle and ladle) to the blue portion of the banner, and some clean-up/minor detail (including doing the eyes on them and dirt on the lower edge of the pavises).
Then I've only got the other half of this Urban Militia to paint, and their commander/guildmaster.  But those may have to take a temporary back seat due to my sudden, inexplicable Man O'War craze...

See you next time!

A quick sign of life

Sooo, as you may have noticed, I've not been doing much hobby stuff lately...
My muse has apparently been on an extended holiday. I've been fairly unfocussed as well, leading me to pull out a project, stare at it for a few days before putting it away again, rinse, repeat...

I did paint a set of Age of Sigmar portals for a mate (finished them this weekend) but I'm not showing those on the interwebs until they've been delivered to him.
This cleared the painting table (if I ignore the small gang of WIPs...) to start on my medievalesque/fantasy Urban Militia. Here's how they stand now:

The men are from the old Harlequin/Black Tree Design range, I'm not sure if they're from the Hundred Years War or Fantasy range. The Pavises are from Mirliton.
The plan is to give them a quick basic paintjob, nothing fancy. I intend to keep the men themselves fairly subdued, to give them a contrast with the bright white and red shields they'll carry.
This is only half of the unit, but I didn't feel like slogging through the entire 15 at once. Especially as this is mainly meant to get me back in the flow again before some of the WIP figures that deserve my A game. (Like my long-awaited Escher Gang, that has been languishing half painted for far too long!)
Or alternatively, this may rekindle my lost, but much appreciated long haul focus on Fantasy. I hadn't been focussed for that long a time (a year+) on a single project/theme and I kind of miss it. But at this point, just to get painting again, on anything really, is a step forward. Mojo first, plans later.

See you next time!

Poultry in motion...

Yesterday I had to stay at home, to wait for the cable guy to replace our connection (apparently the hardware in the wall was out of date, leading to connection problems), so I made good use of available daylight. The peasant maid that goes with the chickens got finished, so here they are:

As with the previous villager the lady and the chickens got a fairly basic paintjob, as these models are to be halfway between miniatures and scenery items in use, they aren't expected to take centre stage.

Like with pigs and pigherd, the animals are from War-bases and the villager is from Foundry.
Hopefully, over the Christmas holidays, I can build them a place to live in.

See you next time!

Porkchop express

Last weekend I painted the pigs and started on the swineherd, part of the medieval village populace I bought at Crisis this year. Today I had the time for a little sitdown with brushes and paint and finished the swineherd.
Here they are:

The pigs are from War-bases. They're Iron Age pigs, whereas I'm basing my fantasy village in the 14th century, but as livestock wasn't systematically improved and bred until Victorian times, I guess I'm good.  I tried to make them look like Tamworths.
The swineherd is from one of Foundry's medieval villagers packs. I chose the running one, as the various "period" Farm shows on Auntie Beeb the past years have taught me that herding swine involves a great deal of chasing...
As they're essentially to be used as terrain, I kept the paint job fairly basic.

I'm trying to match villagers to animals in sets, to make painting a bit more enjoyable and aid me in setting up a believable living village. Next in line: chickens and a maid. Unless a certain rooster-toad offspring pushes it's way to the front of the line. It is after all, the time of year for monsters...