Even More Space Rogues, And Another Terrain Bit

 Last post, I forgot to add a piece of terrain. I also have been painting some more random Stargrave citizens. I really enjoy making these conversions, but they often end up on my desk for a long time, waiting for paint. 

The guy on the left has Stargrave head and arms, and a body from a sprue of zombies. I'm not sure who made them. He's some kind of angry redneck, and I painted him to look a bit like one of the guys in the old cartoon King of the Hill. 

Next to him is a female alien soldier. I always think of these guys as primitive androids, and painted her to fit in with the little unit of company robots that I made a while ago.

 

These two are made from historical bits. The crouching sniper has a body from a Perry Miniatures Afghan soldier and a head and guns from the Stargrave mercenaries. The lady in the purple shirt has a Bolt Action torso, and Stargrave head, arms and legs.

And this pair are unconverted metal miniatures from Copplestone. The guy on the left looks like a thug from the 1980s. The man on the right is some kind of dreadlocked cyberpunk. The thug is a pretty basic miniature and works fine, but the other guy is a really cool sculpt whole simplicity helps it greatly. He reminds me of one of the voodoo priests from William Gibson's excellent novel Count Zero.

And here's the bit of cyber terrain that I forgot about. It's some cheap leftover bits from some plastic robots (maybe Heroclix) with some bits and bobs stuck on for interest. The console is a Mantic part, and the aerial comes from a Necron gun. Beyond that, I'm not sure!

Two Small Bits of Terrain

 I've been making some bits of terrain this week.

This futuristic building was made from a printer ink cartridge on its end, stuck onto a leftover bit of textured MDF. Most of the details came from pieces of Mantic space terrain, some of them cut down to size. 

Here's the unpainted version. The painting was quite easy, with a dark brown wash for the weathering. I did want to paint some big hazard stripes over one side, but I soon discovered that I lack the neatness to do this, so I just went for a flat red. 

It's quite small, but would break up line of sight, and I quite like the raised height.

I also painted this outcrop of rocks. I bought it last year at a convention, for a couple of pounds. It's 3D printed, and has quite a lot of layer lines. I sanded it down a bit, but rocks are going to be a bit uneven (hopefully). Brown and green washes were used to make it look a bit more realistic, along with a static plant.

Knight Armiger (and an angry farmer)

 It's been both really busy and pretty quiet here, what with Christmas and the surrounding chaos. I've had chunks of rushing out to do stuff followed by bouts of free time. I've been using that free time to finally make and paint an imperial knight armiger that I've had lying around for about three years.

Back in 2022, I made this:

While the first model was converted to fit into my Chaos marine army, I thought it would be nice to build the other armiger in the style of my knightly space marines. That would involve lots of heraldry in jolly colours. The large base meant that I'd be able to make a little diorama, to give the impression that something is going on down there.

I used foamboard and clay to put some different heights on the base. I found a Frostgrave plastic soldier and a metal dog from Warlord Games, and stuck them on. The dog is chasing the titan, clearly annoyed by it, and the yokel chap is either saying hello or shouting at the titan to get off his land. 

Otherwise, the titan is pretty much as it came out of the box. I sculpted a little banner over its head, with the pilot's name on it - this is Sir Ewain - but that's it. This took a lot of time, and there are elements that I'm not all that happy about, but overall I really like it. 

It's quite silly but I like the idea of having something interesting going on around the machine. I'm tempted to get some more of these knight models - probably a bad idea, as I've got a lot of other things to get on with. Still, at lease I've finally found a use for that axe and tree stump!

Vampire Ship

 Here's another project that I've been working on gradually. Since I've made some docks for my fantasy town, I thought it would be cool to have a ship docked at them. It would look nice, and would provide a bit more space for characters to fight. I bought a "Strigoi Schooner" from TT Combat: a kit made from laser-cut MDF.

I always think that the TT Combat terrain kits are good for basic shapes, but aren't very detailed. The pieces of detailing that are provided in the kits tend not to be all that good. As a result, I decided to leave off or replace some of the fancy bits. I also decided not to use the coffins that the ship is meant to be pulling, which looked a bit crude.

Once I'd assembled the basic model, I felt that the hull wasn't very smooth. It was made out of progressively narrower pieces of MDF, and looked too basic. Therefore, I got out the DAS clay and smoothed it over the hull. I filed the hull down with a piece of sandpaper, then gave it a coat of watered-down PVA glue. I find that this helps seal the clay and provides a smooth surface to paint. At this point, it looked like this:

Because the meeting of the clay and the MDF was a bit rough, I added a strip of thin plasticard to mark them apart.

Then it was time to add some details. The rear of the raised deck of the ship was a flat bit of wood, so I added some plasticard details.

The lower deck got some details from the bits box. I replaced the basic MDF door with a resin one that I got at an event and stuck a head from a Frostgrave demon over it, to look sinister. An old lamp was mounted it on a bit of plasticard and stuck onto the wall. I found an old resin ladder and trimmed it down to make some stairs up.

I thought it would be cool to make a sinister figurehead for this ship. This came from a plastic ghost model that I'd had for ages. I think it's from the Coven Throne Warhammer kit. It reminds me of the spirit/angel type creatures from Raiders of the Lost Ark. A bit of sprue stuck to her back helped to attach her to the prow of the boat. I added some "wings" that I think were originally bits of tattered cloth. I'm not sure where they came from.

I thought it would be cool to have a lookout on top of the mast. I found a "Vykros blood-born" model from the Warhammer Quest game, which would work perfectly. It was clinging to a ruined pillar. With a bit of trimming, the pillar looked like the top of a mast. 

Time to paint the rest of it. I went for a gothic purple, red and black colour scheme. It looks like the sort of ship that might carry a vampire, or at least somewhere you might buy an Alchemy T-shirt. I named the ship "Demeter" in homage to the ship that carries Dracula to England in the old novel.

And here it is, sliding into port on a sinister mission!

Ruins, Stairs, Peasants and Peasants Standing On Ruins and Stairs

 This week, I headed to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham. Here is a picture of me, soaking up the ambiance and laughing madly at... something. I'm not usually this gormless.

It wasn't the sort of event where you'd go to buy an Ultramarines army (not that I want one), but it did have a lot of small stalls where you could find interesting things. I picked up some bits of terrain.

At one stand, I bought a cheap 3D printed ruined arch from a chap who seemed to be making them in his garage. It's layer-printed, so a little bit crude, but the design is decent. I added a platform to the top, where a model could stand, and stabilised it with one of the many, many barrels that I was bought a while ago (thanks Ruth). 

I also bought some stone and wooden steps made by Dungeons and Lasers. They came on a sprue in a boxed set: Dungeons and Lasers' stuff seems pretty good quality and quite cheap. They're not terribly exciting, but here they are:

Perfectly reasonable stuff, I think, although I slightly prefer the stone ones to the wooden ones. All in all, a pretty good haul. Nothing exceptional, but they're all nice bits of terrain.

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I've also been painting some more of the wretched citizens of Borovia (at least, this is what I imagine them to be). They're West Wind models and are quite simple and cartoony, and they have a vaguely Napoleonic, Eastern European feel. I painted them all fairly quickly, and while they're not my best work, they aren't really the sort of models that I can do anything fancy with (at least, not at my level of skill).

This bloke likes his pies. He has a small musket strapped to his back.

This guy is some kind of half-feral peasant trapper, who probably eats squirrels.

And this bloke is a slightly Cossack-looking swordsman. He's quite small, and I originally intended for him to be a young man. I now think that he's a seasoned duellist. I couldn't tell if that thing on his head was a hat or some kind of beehive hairdo, but I painted it as a hat.

And now, here's the terrain in action! 

A Dock for Mordheim

 For a long while, I've thought it would be cool to add a dock to my Mordheim/Frostgrave terrain. This would involve making some raised levels to represent the harbour wall and the dockside, and would be quite a big job. This week, I finally got around to it.

First, I ordered some foam from ebay. I thought that I was getting foam blocks that I could sculpt into shape, but unfortunately I ordered the wrong thing and got a lot of sheets of foamboard instead. This is basically two sheets of card with foam in between. Oh well. I thought that I'd make the most of it and use that instead.

I bought some textured plasticard from a model shop and got to work.

The first thing to do was to cut the shape of each dock piece (three in total) out of foamboard. They're basically upturned boxes. I stuck pieces of plasticard onto the boxes to represent the upper surface and to hide the joins down the sides. (By the way, use superglue. Plastic cement melts the foam.)

The plasticard was already textured, but for the walls, I scored a brick pattern into the board with a knife (be careful not to cut too deep). Then, to make the bricks look more rounded, I went over the scored marks with a ballpoint pen. This widens the cut and pushes the "bricks" apart. With a base coat of (unsurprisingly) grey, the dock pieces all looked like this:

I then painted it grey and put a lot of washes on. Because of the sea, I used quite a bit of green further down the wall, to suggest algae. 

I added some details with bits and pieces. First, I made a load of little rings that boats could be tied off to (or tied up to or some other preposition). This was done by cutting a square of plasticard for the back piece, then gluing on a ring of thin wire that I bent around a paintbrush handle. The gap was covered in green stuff. 

I also made some mooring posts. These were very simply map pins pushed through plasticard squares and then pinned onto the dock pieces. Little blobs of superglue were added to the rings and posts to suggest bolts. They were painted in a rusted metal colour.

I added a bit of detail to the first dock piece with two baskets of fish left over from the Lord of the Rings River Town houses.

This piece got a bit of string wound around one of the mooring posts, partially to make it more visually interesting and partly to make it clear what these things are for.

Bits of grass (made from sliced-up basing tufts) were pushed into the bigger gaps between the stones, to give the impression that I'd honestly intended them to look like that.

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I've been plotting this piece of terrain for a while, and I bought an Age of Sigmar terrain set ages ago to go with it. Two statues were included in the terrain set, which I separated from the kit and put onto Warmachine bases. I painted them to look like tarnished bronze. They will be looking over the harbour.

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And this is the finished dock!

It been quite an epic project but I'm really pleased with the end result!

And on that note, it's almost Christmas. So, a very happy Christmas to you all!