Making Bases

In today's post I'll show you have I make my cobblestone bases for my figures. I realize that there are many fine companies producing very nice cobblestone bases for reasonable prices. Fortunately for me I happen to live near a talented lunatic named R who enjoys filling 30mm lipped bases with these (Pegasus Hobbies small bricks) to form cobblestone bases for his miniatures.

 He then pins the models directly onto the bricks.  One evening I used the revolutionary and reusable mold medium called Instant Mold to make a quick mold of one of his creations.

This what the package looks like.

Ok lets get down to the down n' dirty tutorial. To make these bases you will need putty,a sculpting tool, hobby knife, sand paper, some water, 30mm (or 40mm) plastic bases and a mold. I've been using the afore mentioned mold for over a year now.

First press putty into the top of the base like so:

Smooth it out as best you can. Water will help with this.

Next press the base putty side down first on to the mold. Press down hard, I use the palm of my hand and put a little weight on it.

Once the putty dries you can safely remove the bases from the mold. You'll end up with this:

As you can see the edges will have to be cleaned up. A sharp hobby knife will do the trick. You may have finger prints in the surface of the bricks, a light sanding will fix that. After the cleanup stage you should end up with great little base like these.

I hope you liked this and found it helpful.

 

Requiem the Shape of Things to Come.

Requiem was the Kickstarter massive miniature expansion of Empire of the Dead which was funded on March 26 of this year. The figures in the kickstarter will become publicly available this summer after the 623 KS backers receive theirs. That should be some time in June.

The April issue of Wargames Illustrated has a full page add for the upcoming public release of the Requiem figures.

I'm one of the KS backers and here are some of the sets that will be coming my way in June.

And the icing on the cake Ladies and Gentlemen Young Queen Victoria with Gatling gun!

On another note I realized that I haven't been posting on a regular schedule so I will change that. I'll be posting weekly on Sunday nights.

Artifact Markers Painted

I've finished off two of my four artifact markers. They are Reaper familiar figures mounted on 30mm bases. I rather like them.

The third one is an old GW daemonette from the late 80's. She looks better in person than in these pictures. I'm still on the fence about the blue color.Sorry for the poor pictures.

The Wonderful Steampunk Designs of Steamboy

You may recall a Japanese animated movie titled Steamboy back in 2004. I just saw it a second time on cable this week and realized how useful to the Victorian sci-fi wargamer. Now the movie was a 10 year effort of Otomo the creator of Akira. As a movie it was a flop. The story line is rather simplistic, but the real letdown IMO was the 2d dimensional characters. The London landscapes and steampunk vehicles are superb.

The British tanks are my favorite design of this film.

My next favorite are the Steam Soldiers, men in steam powered armored suits.

You can see the English language trailer here

Game Boards Update

On Monday we bought an 8'x4' piece of 1/4" MDF board. We had it cut to the various sizes we'll need. These boards will form the bases for the London gaming board. We have enough to make the 4'x4' London board and then some. Progress!

London Playing Board Reffrence

I've been gathering reference photos for the London board.

All of these pictures come from the Granada 1984 TV series Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The most authentically Victorian of any of the Holmes shows. The definitive Sherlock Holmes. You can learn more about the series here

Here is an actual period photo of London. Do you see a comparison?

More from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Transportation.

Countryside Board

The English countryside is a well ordered pastoral landscape. I remember flying to Heathrow airport as a teen and passing over the manicured fields and towns of southwest England. It looked just like a wargames table from the air. No wonder wargaming is so popular in England!  So now on to my country table; its not fully planed out yet. But I do know I want it to look like a picture I have in a book. Its a picture of a ruin on a hill behind a sleepy village. Sorry I don't have the picture digitized. The ruin in the picture looked something like this:
 
The hill with the ruin will be at one end of the table, a four building village will be in the middle and the far end will have fields and hedges. So you can see, it's sort of planned out.

I'm incorporating a piece of Warhammer scenary into this project as the ruin.  Fortuitously for me, my mate had asked me to assemble a GW ruined tower kit some time back. Since we no longer play Warhammer and I'll be scratch building most of the buildings, this seems like a great idea to me to use this as the ruin.

The kit is called the Dreadstone Blight Now I like this kit, its made from thick styrene and is fairly durable. But, its a GW kit so of course it needs hard work to make it fit together. You'd think after all this time GW would have learned how to make a kit that actually fits together properly! But No they didn't. You'll need to do a fair amount of filing to get the first floor sections to fit together and form a circle. I got as close is I could and then filled in the gaps with putty.

 You can see where the pieces don't fit exactly. This was as close as I was able to get it.

I had to cover up the gaps where the pieces didn't join together properly with putty. That was basically all of them. Also all the pieces have these jig saw puzzle piece edges. I had to fix the edges that are not supposed to connect to another piece by adding additional stones. The skulls on this piece are not as obnoxious as most other GW scenery kits. Even so I wanted to remove some of the warhammer iconography, but the owner (my mate) dis-aloud it. A bit of a shame IMO. I could have replaced it with some crosses to give it less of a warhammer feel.

Stay tuned for the next Countryside Board update.