Last Of The Guardians

After months of footering about I've finally finished the last figures of for my Everglade Guardians.

First we have the main offenders, 2 mounted Grenadier sculpts courtesy of EM4 miniatures. Quite nice figures although there were molding problems of the Warchief's shield (which was missing it's lower half).

Secondly there is the large eagle from Ral Partha, painted in a rough Golden Eagle style.

15mm Skirmish Box - WIP

A quicky here. It's funny how some projects just suddenly pop into your head from nowhere. This one came from a discussion on gift boxes!

So the idea is to have a box which contains enough stuff to quickly open the box and get playing with minimum time. It's got to play on the kitchen table and be completely self contained whilst still looking good.

After a bit of thought, 15mm seemed to be scale to run with. Both for space and price. At 15mm 2' x 2' is the ideal table space which can easily fit on a table.

So here is a quick progress shot. I'm using four 1 foot x 1 foot self adhesive vinyl floor tiles as a board. The texture is a scaled down Rake Corner Map from Dave Graffam. The building is also Dave Graffam's, but from his old free range (that makes up most of my 28mm fantasy town). There has been a bit of minor kit-bashing to make it fold flat for storage in the box (at the moment a 12" Pizza box for the tile size).

Warbands have been sourced from 15mm.co.uk. I have figures to form Barbarian, Undead and Orc warbands ordered.

Well more as it's done...

Building Roads

I've been missing decent tarmac roads in my towns for a long time and finally got round to creating some.

For the job I bought some cheap (B&Q basic) textured black self adhesive vinyl floor tiles, and cut them into 6" x 9" sections (the size will become apparent later). I thought I could just do a quick dry brush with a dark grey to bring out the texture, but it the result was a streaky, so a light patchy spray of matt black, targeting the worst streaks, brought everything back down a bit (see below). I tried to be as sparing with the paint application as possible to avoid potential warping. I did take a few pictures of the various stages, but they all came out looking the same black oblongs!

A tile section brushing, sprayed and looking black!

Next a piece of cereal packet cardboard was but to the 6" x 9" and a couple of center lines were cut to template road markings. I was going to stipple white paint over the template areas, but couldn't find my tube of white paint and used white spray instead. A double edged sword this, as the spray gives a nice light coverage, but where the template was not flush the edges were feathered so need tidied up with black when the white had dried. I also wrestled with whether the roads would be right or left hand drive for the junctions but in the end , realising it didn't matter, used the cardboard edge to mask off a couple of section ends and sprayed right across the entire junction.

The result is a relatively clean tarmac road which I can use for my modern and beyond games. With a few craters, rubble sections They'll even manage in a ruined cityscape (as per the top photo).

Now onto phase 2. Remember the the attempt at intrigue over the 6" x 9" tile size? Well this is the largest tile size of Dave Graffam's Cobbled tile toolkit product, where you can create and print cobbled sections with a combination of various textured layers.

I had printed out a a few various cobbled sections beforehand. These are then just carefully applied to the reverse of the tarmac tiles on the self adhesive side, which gives a lovely tight dry bind (although be warned, there is no repositioning the paper with this tough glue!). This results in a nice cobbled street layout for no extra storage space. Bonus!

The cobbled side will be good for main streets in Fantasy towns or for Victorian era gaming.

Dave Graffam Ruins

A bit of a lean period gaming wise, work schedules, weariness, etc have led to no games and a bit of a funk in enthusiasm. These periods happen though, so no real need to worry.

Whilst not being up to the levels needed to paint I have kept myself ticking over building some ruin kits downloaded from Dave Graffam.

For the ruins I print out the sheets on normal paper and mount one wall\floor side on picture mounting card before applying the other side of the wall\floor and assembling. This isn't and exact process as the kits are not designed to be assembled this way, but there is quite a lot of room for maneuver as they are ruins after all.

Using the mounting card gives a very durable end result, whilst still being easy to use with just a sharp hobby knife. I have been basing on thick box cardboard to try and avoid warping (and ease of cutting) which was a problem with earlier attempts using cork as a base. I then use wall filler to cover the ends and apply a coat of paint and wash to roughly match the table base mat I use.

The cost per building is pretty low.Most kit designs cost between $3-$5 (£2-£3), and many have a choice of texture layers, so that you can print out the same kit with different brick colour, window layout, etc to avoid repetition. Dave quite often has dollar sales as well, so it's worth keeping an eye out.