Lots of new terrain: Dutch farm, trees, fences and craters

Well, that escalated quickly! Sometime back in August, I decided to buy a handful of minis for each of the four countries featured in the book ‘Hitler's Blitzkrieg Enemies 1940: Denmark, Norway, Netherlands & Belgium’. Less than two months later, I now have a completed 500 pt. Dutch army for Bolt Action and components to build Belgian and German armies of similar size!

Those armies need some terrain to fight over, so I also bought this MDF kit from Sarissa Precision. I think it captures the look of a Dutch farm pretty well. The only thing I didn’t like was the look of the tiled roof, so I used an old towel to represent thatching. The towel required a lot of glue to stick it down, because the towel and MDF both kept soaking up the thinned down wood glue. With some perseverance, though, I think I got a pretty convincing result. The pattern on the window shutters was a lot of fun to paint and is based on designs common in my area.

Every farm needs fencing, so I made a bunch of fences from some wooden coffee stirrers. I designed them to be about chest height for your average 28 mm scale mini. The fences were hot glued to 2 mm thick plasticard, which was then textured with used coffee grounds, painted brown and flocked.

I also had these cheap model rail road trees laying about. I didn’t really do anything to the trees apart from hot gluing them to some washers (size M10) and then texturing, painting and flocking the bases.

Finally, I also made some craters. The craters are based on 2mm plasticard and the lips of the craters are made of DAS air drying clay. Top tip: DAS clay does not like to stick to plastic, so add a little bit of wood- or PVA glue to your base (you don’t need a lot) before you start sculpting. This should stop the clay from sliding about when you are working. After letting the clay cure overnight, I again textured the bases with used coffee grounds, painted them and applied my flock.

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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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