British militia and rowboats

Having made a Dutch merchant vessel with crew, I needed some enemies to fight them. After careful deliberation I settled on British lobsterbacks. The minis are by Firelock Games, although not from the British faction. The captain is Spanish and the troops are French (Flibustiers and Milices des Caraïbes), but after painting their coats red they look convincingly British to me.

The paint scheme is pretty straightforward: Citadel Mephiston Red for the uniforms, white for the trimmings, black for the leather and Vallejo Flat Brown 70.984 for the scabbards and gun stocks. On two of the models I replaced the white trousers with grey ones (Medium Sea Grey 70.870) to imply non-standard equipment. Finally, Glorious Gold 72.056 was used for the brass parts of the weapons and the sash and scabbard of the captain were painted Vallejo Medium Blue 70.963.

I also painted up six cannons (again Firelock Games models) and scratch-built two row boats using the Gary Chalk plans that came with the plans of the sailing ship. They are made out of polystyrene sheet for the base, cardboard and a few coffee stirrers for detailing. The oars were spare parts from my Zvezda Greek trireme kit. Now the redcoats can bravely try to board the Halve Maen!

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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 ...

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Roman watchtower

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Little Tanks & Tiny People

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