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...

Click here for part 1 Click here for part 2   With my new battle mat from Pwork having arrived, I now have everything to take proper pictures of the Halve Maen. All that remained to be done since my previous post was to add the masts, sails and flags. I made the masts using wooden dowels in three diameters: 8 mm for the lower masts, 6 mm for the upper masts and 4 mm for the yards. I bought them online and had to buy order them in bulk, so I have plenty left for at least another ten ships... But I’m sure they’ll come in handy for future projects.   The flags were made of aluminium tape sandwiched between two layers of regular printer paper. The aluminium tape can be manipulated to create the illusion of wind and will hold its shape, while the paper provides for a nice surface for painting. As I have no sewing skills whatsoever, my wife kindly helped me with the sails. And I think she did an amazing job! The fabric was scavenged from an old pair of linnen trousers and I th...

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,...

Click here for part 1 ,  Click here for part 3 Continuing on with building my take on the Gary Chalk ship, I have now finished painting the hull. I purposely have not attached the upper masts yet, as I thought this would make painting a lot easier and would reduce the risk of poking an eye out. Painting was pretty easy and fun, apart from the yellow bits. Yellow paint is notorious for not wanting to cover and even after five coats there are still areas that are not fully opaque! Just simple phone images for now. I'll take proper photos once she's all done.   I have christened her the Halve Maen (Half moon), after a Dutch East India Company ship that sailed to New York in 1609. The model bears little resemblance to the actual vessel, but I like the name and fancy old spelling of Maen (rather than the modern Maan).

Click here for part two Click here for part three During the Christmas break the wife and I rewatched Muppets Treasure Island (Muppets Christmas Carol would have been more fitting). Bitten by the pirate bug I quickly ploughed through Robert Louis Stevenson’s book the movie is based on, followed by Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood. If anyone knows of any other swashbuckling classics, I’m open for suggestions! Anyway, as usual my craze of the moment also crept into my hobbying, as I found myself surfing the web for a 28mm scale ship and a swashbuckling crew to man it. Not surprisingly, 28mm scale ships tend to be rather expensive, so I decided to scratch build my own. And lucky for me, a chap called Gary Chalk has published a set of building plans for doing just that. The plans can be found in various places on the web and all you need are some sheets of (balsa) wood, wooden dowels and cardboard.  I really like that Gary’s plans guide you through building a basic vessel, but let y...