A Sad Sort of Birthday

It's been four years.

Wow.

I say sad because i haven't posted for a wee while. And it feels even longer because the last few posts were scheduled. The usual reasons, back in my MMO days we used to say "RL" nowadays when i'm excusing an absence form blogging i tend to go into more detail, work, tiredness, my illness.

All of those are true, but no particular glaring issue presents. I've painted some americans, I p[l;ayed a game of Operation Squad, well a few actually and enjoyed them greatly. but i've had so much work to do of late as we close in towards the end of the academic year and i am still desperately short of staff at work, that the last thing ive felt like doing is getting on the PC and writing some more.

It will improve, I've still got a fairly substantial painting queue and I'm not abandoning this hobby in any way, i just want to reassure you all I'm still here, just a bit tired right now. :)

back to the topic at hand, four years, woah. in that time ive had over 208, 000 page views! 

for the first time since it was written the AoBR conversions are no longer the all time top hit!

the top five now looks like this:

Stormtalon conversion post
Painted Stormtalon post

Seems people are interested in changing up this beast eh?

Dark Vengance conversion

him too... and all three ov those have topped out the all time hits for the old front runner:

The AoBR Terminator conversion article

Rounding out the top five is my scant article on Games Day last year i guess i had a picture or two others didnt, either ay a healthy readership


So in closing, thankyou all for continuing to read both new and old archived articles on this blog, I'm on a wee bit of downtime right now, but I am a teacher and summer holidays means gaming holidays to me, so keep your eyes peeled for content and thankyou for your patience!

Hedges

I’ve made two trenches of hedge/bocage style cover for the table, and wanted to share both what and how I’d put them together. be warned though they fall into the “quick and dirty” camp, so might not be for everyone.

 

So these were the first hedges I made, allright, but not very inspiring, I thought I could do better. these are a cheap scouring pad, a bit of hardboard for the base, some aquarium gravel and some styrene to build the gate. static grass on the base, flock on the scouring pad, job done.. I photographed the build of the next batch I made, and also made some improvements.

I made them shorter sections for a start..

The stone walls are built up with hot glue and aquarium gravel.

Dump a bunch of the gravel out into a tray or suchlike

run a bead of hot glue on the board….

Dunk, and allow a second for the glue to cool and bite…

run another bead of glue atop the pile, dunk again.. repeat until desired hieght is reached, then shake off any loose ones…

I glues a few tree armatures and scouring pad bushes into some of the sections

and that’s it, very quick very easy.. paint them, flock them, add clump, bushes etc

the final product looks like this:

and yes, regular reader theese are the “new” trees from part 2 of my treesperiments, more on them, next post!

Thanks for reading.. till next time

Make hay while the sun shines…

or, well, doesn’t shine..

yeah, so I made hay.

I’d started to put together this lean-to as part of a set of scenery for the farm I’ve made for WW2 games, and realised I needed some hay bales, but that ideally I needed a few, so in a fit of “just getting on with it” I set to:

I made a few blocks of blue foam about the right size…

sculpted in some rough detail, pricking the end with a needle and scoring the sides and top..

I then tied them up with picture hanging wire as you might find in a certain sweedish furniture shop..

then I grabbed an old greenstuff box and some plasticene, and set them atop it..

mixed up and poured some silicone rubber..

after 24 hours curing, I de-molded them and cleaned up the molds.

mixed up and poured some resin..

this sets up in about thirty minutes so I was able to repeat this several times fairly quickly

and dress my lean to, as well as making a few freestanding piles of hay bales.

 

now I know they look a bit rough, but this was all done and painted in a few hours effort, so I’m not complaining

German Tank crews

Operation squad rules (and I’m sure many others) call for a de-meched tank crew to be feildable.

For some units, such as Hanomag and Kubelwagen this is easy, as these were crewed by regular soldat.. but for tanks and other AFV’s it’s more of a challenge, because there are very few models out there that represent German tank crews, the iconic Panzer wrap around blouse, is hard to come by, particularly in Op Squad compatible rules, as the ruleset allows each crewman to be armed with an MP40, wheras most models have at best pistols.

The solution? artizan designs Panzer Lehr. not ideal as the gear is a bit over the top for a tank crew, but they have both the blouse and MP40, so I call that good enough..

Some of the facial sculpts are a wee bit goofy, but the posing and attention to detail on the gear is awesome (and it might be my paint amplifying the goof here )

anyway, on to the single shots..

This guy will be one of the vehicle commanders, probably the Stug

This guy is in charge in the armoured car.. I love the coat.. I very nearly painted it black, but a wee bit of googling showed me a real coat, and the colours were too cool not to try and replicate..

 

 

Hope there was something to interest here. I’ll be back shortly, most probably with more Germans.. or Americans.. or maybe I’ll finally get back to some 40k.. hm, really should write an apology to my regular readers about this lengthy diversion from the usual