Modelling water on ship bases

Sooo, I got the request to make a little tutorial about how I model the water on my ship bases.

Its actually not that hard, but putting things in pictures makes stuff much easier to learn and ofcourse its much more pleasing to the eye!

So while finishing my King George V battleship I used the opportunity to take some pictures while modelling the water effects. Read on for the secret of how to make an awesome ship base!

Building USS Texas

It's that time of year again...

Ever since I've been playing War at Sea I've been fascinated by the scratchbuilds being made by the WaS community. Never having tried building man-made structures out of plasticcard (only did some extensive modding on existing ships) I decided to give it a try myself.

Starting from simple cargo ships I've worked up my game to the first highpoint, IJN Nachi. But after Nachi entered my glass cabinet it took almost a year to relight the fire and start scratchbuilding again, this time producing IJN Fuso and HMS Prince of Wales. That was almost a year ago. A year in which I stopped playing Warhammer, picked up Medievals, picked up Flames of War and kind of neglected my Naval miniatures. I think its time to start another project, and since someone has been knocking on my door to do so since the day after I finished the PoW I think it's kind of obvious what the subject should be.

Soooo, stay tuned for the building of USS Texas... I'll be updating this post as progress is made. Untill now I've only made a post on a project after I've almost finished it but thats not the case here since I'm still building (So in a worst-case scenario I'll blow the whole thing off halfway).

Update: I finally finished the model, scroll down for the total building process or just enjoy the pics at the end.

Building a Flames of War Objective

Sooo, since I like to give all my miniature armies some uniqueness by little conversions, additions and scratchbuilds I figured it would be a good time to do some scratchbuilding for my Flames of War army.

The subject this time would be making an objective, since my forces were lacking one. Flames of War only specifies the measurements of the base-area an objective need to cover, so there were no limitations beyond that.

I set my mind to building some sort of radio-station or radar, that would be a nice objective to either capture or defend for my forces.

After some googling I stumbled upon the following picture:


That would be an awesome objective to capture; a German Wurzburg Riese (Giant Wurzburg) Radar station.

HMS King George V and HMS Prince of Wales

So, for this project I decided that I was going to try to build 3 ships at the same time (big mistake!). And to add insult to injury I also figured I would try a more difficult project than any of my scratchbuilds to date….

Making camouflage netting

Ok, this blog entry I will explain how I made the camonetting on my Flames of War tank destroyers, its quite simple actually but it is a very cool addition to a mini.

The finished mini:


Click on 'read more' for the tutorial and feel free to leave a comment!

Uss San Francisco

This ship was not a scratchbuild but rather a mod of one of the WAS mini's in my collection. I've tried to bring the model to life by adding the camo, some more deck clutter, antennae and the floatplanes.



More pics after the link, clicky!

Battleship Fuso of the Imperial Japanese Navy

The IJN battleship Fuso (1:1800) was my second scratchbuild project, finished in November 2011 and just in time to enter the 2011 Forumini Golden Battleship competition; winning 1st prize.




You can check out the building process after clicking:

Building IJN Nachi

Ok, so here's the first of my scratchbuilt warships, scale 1:1800. I've built this ship in January 2010. After studying some tutorials at the Forumini made by their expert modellers I decided to give scratchbuilding a shot. I aquired some plasticcard and looked for a nice subject to build.
This turned out to be a IJN nachi. War at Sea had its own Nachi model, but the details and dimensions on it were terrible. When I got the mini I was quite disappointed... The sizes seemed to be quite off making my favorite cruiser look quite fat.

Something better must be possible for this beautiful ship so I tried building one myself. I already tried building some cargoships but this would be my first warship...

She turned out way way way better than I ever expected so I also entered her in the then-new Golden Battleship competition 2010 organised by the Forumini, taking first prize!

More about the building process behind the link, clicky!

Update!

Sooo, I'ts been some time since I've updated the blog and in the meantime lots of stuff has happened. It has been raining here for like the past two months, so I've never had a chance to take some nice pictures of all my work. In the Bible it rained for 40 days and they called it a disaster, here in the Netherlands we call that summer -.-.

But since better weather has reached us by now I'll be taking pictures again!

Other developments are that I've abandoned my quest for writing my own ruleset for the time being (I may revive it in the future though) for a few reasons. First reason is that is is not that hard to write a decent ruleset, the really hard part is writing army lists that go wíth the ruleset (>>insert 'I told you so!' quotes here<<)! I've become a bit stranded in the overkill of historical settings, details on army composition, regional history and statlines. A shame really, but with a daytime job my other interest really suffered on this project.

Then the news hit that Fireforge, the company which miniatures form the majority of my medieval collection is planning to bring out their own ruleset Deus Vult at the end of the year. That would mean that I could check out their ruleset and maybe actually find some opponents to play against! Something that is a lot more difficult when trying to find opponents for your own game. So I've decided to wait out till Deus Vult hits and check that out. I've still got some more knights and levies painted though so I'll post pics of those in the near future. After a simple rebasing round they will be all set for another gaming system.

With this blog no longer being dedicated to my own ruleset I've decided to expand the scope a bit to include my other interest in miniature gaming, that being WW2, both land (Flames of War) and Sea (War at Sea / Victory at Sea 2 when it comes out). I've done a lot of modelling and painting for both and especially for War at Sea. I've been active on the Forumini (http://aaminis.myfastforum.org/index.php) for quite some years and I'll try to bundle some of my modelling contributions to that forum on my own blog.

Thats it for now!

A basing picture tutorial

Soo, this is going to be the first tutorial on my blog. I've done some tutorials before, and the main thing that in my mind makes a tutorial easy to follow is pictures, lots of pictures! So I'm going to do my best here :-D

On my warhammer models I've used all kinds of different techniques, some as basic as just putting static grass all over the base or some as difficult as doing rocky outcroppings or tiles. Since I'm currently painting a lot of miniatures to get set for some serious playtesting I've decided to go for the middle road. The main colors of my gameboard are brown and green grass so thats the same I'm going for with my bases.

This is the finished product I'm going for (way to go showing off my first archer :-)


Sooo, lets get started!

Thomas de Berkeley

Yey! So I finally got some sunshine here in the rainy Netherlands. Time to take some pictures of my second noble, Thomas de Berkeley. The real Thomas de Berkeley (his grandson) had 10 white crosses on his heraldry, but since that would look very messy at this scale I've decided to only add 6. Since it is not known until 1250 what heraldry the de Berkeley's were wearing (Thomas appears on the Falkirk Roll of 1298) I've come up with the solution that 4 more crosses were added since his forebears went on crusade. Of course this is fictional, but thats the fun in coming up with your own characters.

Objective markers!

So during the writing of rules and the painting of mini's I came up with the idea of making some objective markers. Considering what would be a good objective I ended up with one simple thing: Food! Every army marched on its belly and foraging was a major reason for skirmishing or battle.

Of course, little signs labeled 'here be food' is not very pretty on the tabletop to fight over so I've done a bit of brainstorming and ended up with either cattle or harvested products. First I've tried to get hold of some cattle, but that turned out to be less easy than I expected. As an alternative to ordering miniature cattle from the miniatures-companies I looked for toys, since that would be a big difference in price. Well, beside the big difference in price there is also a big difference in scale! Even the smallest pig I could find was about half as big as a horse (that would provide a lot of meat though!).

Since that idea was wiggled off to the kids' toybin, it was time for plan B. Since raiders would probably not be too keen on harvesting or processing food I figured they would be looking for stuff that they could easily carry off. Big sacks of grain seemed like a good way to go. I brought my tailoring skills to bear and cut up an old t-shirt into little strips of cloth, sowed those together (the things I do for this hobby), turned them inside out, filled them with ballast and painted them up. Mounted on bases so they will be distinguishable as gaming pieces the end result was quite statisfying :D.

Levy Militia

So, I've just finished one group of 10 levy militia.

Since there are no 12th century kits availiable I've used the multi-part plastic 'Saxon Fyrd' kit miniatures by Wargames factory. Since ordinary militia would probably have much the same weaponry in the 10th as in the 12th century I thought they could do. I've used as much kiteshields as possible since the round shield would be very much outdated by then but there weren't enough of them in the kit (not much a surprise as I'm planning to have 24 militia and only 12 kiteshields are availiable).

I've decided against the more modern kite- and heatershields since I figured that militia wouldn't have any 'modern' equipment. Those I'm saving for the sergeants.





They've turned out very nice, very characterfull mini's!

Lord Bardolf

So the first retinue I've been working on is almost done,

Lord Doun Bardolf, Baron of Wormegay and Shelford, father of William and Thomas (yet to be painted) with a retinue of two squires carrying the extra equipment and four mounted sergeants.

Lord Bardolf has been put together from the Fireforge Games teutonics (awesome sculpts!). The squires are from the plastic norman knights set from Conquest games, converted with extra equipment and headswaps. I used the gambeson bodies in the sprue for the squires and the chainmail bodies for the sergeants.




The sergeants are Conquest Games Norman knights, only minimal conversion done by a headswap and some alteration to the helmets.




In the future there are going to be some sergeants on foot to complete the retinue, but since there I have not found any plastic 12th/13th footsoldiers, those will wait a bit since both Conquest and Fireforge have announced that they will be bringing out those in the near future. In the meantime I will work on my second retinue and some Levy Militia to be able to put the first scenario together. After that I'll flesh out the retinue with more retainers like a standard bearer, veteran etc.

** Note: It has been correctly pointed out that the heraldry of the squires and sergeants aren't in line with history. I'll be correcting those errors after I finish my current paintwork, stay tuned for updates :D