The Warhammer Cottage unleased a wave of creativity in my friends and I the winter it was first published. Old cereal packets, plastic tape boxes and oodles of cat litter sand were sacrificed as we constructed sprawling villages. These buildings would be spread across Russell Parson's snooker table, hedges made from lichen scraped from local stones and walls made from piles of pebbles.
It was over vistas such as these that my childhood battles were fought. Everything on the field at once. No army lists. No victor, for we never managed to complete a battle in the short amount of time we had. Just setting everything up and basking over the glory of it all was often enough for us.
Still, by the time White Dwarf 132 plonked itself down on my doorstep, fatigue had started to set in. Glancing at the complexity of the dwarf mine shown above, we all promptly gave up and moved on to other exciting things, like Advanced Space Crusade.
Having thoroughly enjoyed the process of building the Warhammer Cottage and Townhouse I was keen to continue the trend and build the mines and hills after shirking my duty all those years ago. This project would really stretch me and prepare for this summer's extravaganza of making a more permanent gaming board. Here was a little task that would teach me what works and what wouldn't work in fantasy scenery.
And here is the result. Eager dwarfs prospect a new seam of glittering gold. You can see them here having just brought a heavy mine cart of the stuff to the surface. The keen eyed of you will notice another engineer has joined the ranks of my latest bunch. The structure was built exactly the same way as my carboard and foam board buildings were. Only, I didn't use black as the basis of the wood. I used the same recipe that I used for the extended Cottage last month or so. Bestial Brown, Orc Brown and Bleached Bone. The gold, if you are wondering, is smashed quartz from my driveway.
.jpg)
Keeping things as authentic as I could I even used original 1980s polystyrene which I found under our old boiler. It was removed last October and MFM spotted the stuff sticking out from under its hood. I rescued the valuable material and took it down to my workshop. Thankfully, I had the sense to nab some before my workshop was closed off by kitchen. I shaped and worked the stuff using a bread knife and sand-paper just like the article suggests.
One thing I did learn was not to buy gold paint. Or any other metallic paint either. I was using straight Mithril Silver straight out of the pot and mixing it with yellow, orange and brown to make different metallic hues. It worked a treat though the highlighting of the ore in these photos is lost by the lighting conditions. I plan to go back and make them a little more obvious at some point.
I have a forth engineer who never made it to the party. I ran out of time to finish him but you'll see him soon enough. He was the most battered of the figures I had and his candle had been badly damaged. This I repaired easily enough but what he was coated with very difficult to remove. Presumably some kind of enamel paint. Not even the Dettol was strong enough to shift it!! I had to break out the Nitro-Mors!
He was fun to paint and I used even less of my paints than before. I'm really enjoying getting to grips with these dwarf figures and I hope to get my hands on more of them in the future. Humans/Dwarfs verses goblins is the backbone of Warhammer Battles during this era, something I am keen to explore if I have luck.
We will have an proper look at him when the second engineer is complete but for now he is happy enough to hold his mattock and brood over the treasures still unclaimed in the caverns below.
The two outbuildings were also constructed and painted in much the same way. They are useful little dwellings or any battlefield really and will no doubt be used widely in future. Readers with very long memories may well spot some of my older scenery pieces here, I used them way back when with my McDeath project. I was able to restore them recently and I was pleased to get them out again for a new project. They are all from Foundry.
The tiled roof shack. I wonder who lives in here?
And the canvas roofed shack. Obviously, where they keep the explosives! MFM needs a noble mention now as it was she who gave me her binka to roof the structure. I used garden string as rope too, gluing the lot down with Superglue and drybrushing furiously. I had no access to modelling clay though the process described in the article does interest me. You roll the stuff out, shape and sculpt it in position over the roof of the model. Certainly something I hope to try in future so we will probably see another version of this model one day.
I also had a crack and making a hill in much the same way. I lack flock and static grass or indeed modelling sand to attempted to use polyfilla. The result is okay and I was happy apinting the surface in all manner of shades of green but I am not sure they work in natural light. Still, I know what NOT to do when I complete the gameboard in the summer and the hills and mine can always be repainted.
NOTE: these sheep are also from Foundry and were recently rediscovered by me. They didn't need any repairs having survived the years away unscathed. These too, were used in my McDeath period.
The finer details in life often make it worth living. Here you can see my mine cart and gold store up close. Both of these were scratch built by me using the details in White Dwarf. I am most pleased with the wheels on the mine cart as I now know how to make them. Like all fantastic ideas it was really rather simple. Hole-punched card for the larger circle and a smoothed down skeleton shield boss from the famous Horde and Army boxsets. Smaller sprues sliced up served as the basis of the bolts too.
The three piles of gubbins are all from Foundry too. I painted these up as a small group a few days ago as they add flavour and character to my mine.
To round things off here I a full scale shot of my new scenery piece. What do you think? As I was saying I'm not too sure of the green of the grass. It is a little chalky for my tastes (probably a boyhood on the Jurassic Coast) but I tried to make it look more natural by adding some patches of flock and static grass. My supplies of these are minimal but I learnt years ago that less, is very much more in this business.
I used card as a base and sadly it has warped a little. You can probably see the curvature in this picture. I intend to weigh down the model with heavy stones once I am back in my workshop. A good few weeks under some weighty pebbles will hopefully remedy the situation. I am aware that old grognards know a trick or two so if you have and methods for straightening out cardboard please do let me know.
Isn't it walls, hedges and fences next?
Orlygg
No comments:
Post a Comment