Some more Warhammer 40k terrain: oil barrels and church ruins (pt 1)

I’m starting off the new year with some more 40k terrain. The first three pieces are so simple that they don’t really deserve their own post. These are just some resin oil barrels by Mini Monsters grouped in a pleasing manner, glued to a bit of plasticard and given a coat of paint. I should have given the resin more than just a quick rinse, though, because the paint kept coming off in some places when applying washes.

I also started work on a slightly more ambitious project, although it’s still pretty straightforward really. I’m building a ruined church building. The windows are resin parts made by Scenery Forge, everything else will be scratch-built. The resin windows were one-sided, so I started by gluing sets of two of them back to back. The wall segments I made by gluing together two pieces of corrugated cardboard, making sure to glue them together so that the corrugations ran horizontal on one piece and vertical on the other. In this way, the walls will be considerably stronger then when the corrugations run in the same direction. Next, I simply cut some window-shaped holes in the cardboard and hotglued the windows in place.

I then added some buttresses cut out of blue foam and some other details from thin non-corrugated cardboard.

When the glue had dried, I textured everything with slightly thinned down wall filler/spackle stippled on with on old paintbrush.

I then cut a base out of plasticard and hotglued the walls to it once the filler had dried. The cardboard had warped a little from the wet filler, so there were some noticeable gaps between the walls. These were filled in with some more filler.

For the floor I used a material that I have not seen used by anyone else before. In my local supermarket, the lunch meats are sold in packets that have a plastic tray on the bottom that is textured with these little squares (see picture below).

In my mind these look like perfect miniature tiles, so for the last few years I’ve been cutting out these squares, waiting for a moment when they would come in handy. And that time has now finally come! I just stuck them down with some wood glue (PVA glue) and I think they will look great once painted.

This is as far as I got. A bit more detailing to do and then I can slap on some paint.

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt. I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

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