Little Tanks & Tiny People

So, I made some more terrain to go with my coastal fort and ship . I’m particularly pleased with how the rocks came out. I made them out of a sheet of white polystyrene foam. It’s the exact same material used in packaging, only sold in sheets for crafting. Compared to pink or blue foam, white polystyrene is a lot more difficult to work with. It’s also insanely messy! It takes a bit of practice to cut the foam in a way that you can’t see that the polystyrene consists of thousands of individual balls. Painting on a heavy coat of wall filler/spackle also helps to hide these. After cutting and applying the filler I then brushed on a coat of grey primer. I then heavily drybrushed everything with a broken white/light beige. I then gave the rocks a black wash, followed by a dark brown wash. Finally, I gave everything a light drybrush of white and added flock. For the plants I used some cheap palm trees bought on Ebay and various fake plants from the Dutch equivalent of a dollar store. Th...

  First stratchbuild of the year! I made a simple coastal fort to go with my ship the  Halve Maen . I forgot to take work-in-progress pictures, but construction was very straightforward. I started by making a rectangular box out of two 15x15 cm MDF picture frames for the top and bottom and four 18x15 cm sheets of polystyrene for the walls. The 18 cm height of the walls meant that I could divide the tower into three 6 cm tall levels. I simply hotglued these together to form the basic shape and then added a parapet using some left over blue foam. I made the parapet 3 cm high - giving the tower a total height of 21 cm - with the cut-outs being 1.5 cm high.   For the external staircase I used strips of cork that I cut from a coaster. As the coaster was 1 cm thick, six steps gave me the exact height to reach the first floor. I wish I could say that this was clever planning on my part, but I’m afraid it was completely down to luck!   After this, I added details like ...

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 t...

My ship the Halve Maen , which I’ve been working on for the past two months or so, is finally finished and ready to set sail! I’m not quite sure, though, how to take decent pictures. My trusty light box works very well for minis, but larger items are always a bit of a struggle. I’ve ordered a sea-themed battle mat from Pwork that should serve as a nice backdrop, but delivery is taking slightly longer than planned. It might therefore take a little while for the Halve Maen to turn up here, but I think she’s worth the wait.  In the meantime, I’ve painted up a crew for her. All minis are by Firelock Games for their game Blood & Plunder. They are definitely scaled on the ‘heroic’ side of the 28 mm range, but the sculpts are absolutely lovely with nice poses and crisp, easy to paint details. I really liked the box art of the Dutch militiamen, so basically copied that colour scheme of yellow with red and white details. I did change the bright yellow to a slightly more mustardy colour,...