"Terrain," a Plan, and morning progress

Raw materials.

Since my FLGS doesn't do terrain, you have to port it in with you when you go there to game.  While I have a fairly nice setup for Uncharted Seas, a blue base isn't going to work for Warmahordes and the islands are comically undersized for 28mm.  I have plenty of foam and hardboard left over from those islands, but making up new hills and things will take a bit of time.  Since I want to have "terrain" for Thursday I needed a quicker route.  Carrying a minis case and bag of books, dice, etc. as I am, I'm not too keen on adding another box on top of it for terrain, so space saving factored into my plans.  The answer was quick and easy: felt "terrain".  The idea is simple and one you're all no doubt familiar with, cutting out felt shapes to stand in as hills and forests.  There's no 3d element of course, but since Warmahordes runs on standardized shapes and volumes determined by base size it will work well enough.  It's also a quick, cheap, and easy solution that I can roll up and stuff into a bag.  While I intend to get on some real terrain, this will be a good place holder.  As a slight change from the Uncharted Seas setup, I put weights in the bottom cloth to try and hold it in place on the table.  Because fabric comes short of 48" on the bolt, and because the tables at the FLGS are wider than 48", the cloth won't quite be  4' x 4'.  This isn't an entirely bad thing though as there should (hopefully) be less shifting of the cloth due to foot traffic and overhang.  We'll see how it turns out.



After many iterations, I think I'm closing in on a tournament build.  The main ideas are pIrusk, Black Ivan, Greylords, and Winter Guard.  With Superiority and a Ternion cloud, Ivan is DEF 17 against shooting, plus any missed shots will trigger Dodge and let him move around (though not Bulldoze).  I don't need to say much more about the WGI Deathstar, but I will anyway: the Ternion cloud bumps them to DEF 20 against shooting.  This still doesn't help with their big weakness (templates), but it's still nice to have.  The Greylords also have a magic spray for Incorporeal and other things that need magic attacks.  The rest is still up for debate, but currently has the Great Bears, eEiryss, Widowmakers, and probably some other stuff.  With some things decided, I'm using this list as the list I paint towards.  The good news is I have all the pieces primed and ready for painting.  The bad news is only the Winter Guard are actually painted, and then it's just the unit with no UA or WAs.  It's a bit of a hill to climb, but settling on which particular hill will help me direct my steps towards a particular goal and (eventually) reach it.  I'm trying to tell myself that if I can get it painted before the Warstore's Black Friday sale gets going then I'll fill out the pButcher theme list (and maybe some Kayazys) with that sale, but that's very optimistic.  Once I get things firmed up more then perhaps I'll break it down into more manageable goals.

A new dynamic duo.

For now I'm all but certain I'll be running pIrusk and Black Ivan, either together or separately.  I've mused a bit about painting Ivan previously, and over the weekend I remembered the pot of Tamiya Smoke EV gave me way back when and decided to give it a try.  I got bases down for all the metals on Ivan, then slopped around a thick coat of Smoke.  Turns out it smells a lot like cough syrup.  It seemed to take a while to dry, and I'm not sure it was completely dry when I went back to Ivan despite letting it sit for an hour or more.  The results looked pretty good, very similar to a thorough washing.  When I get back to him I'll take a second look to determine whether I can leave it as is or need to highlight a bit, but hopefully I can call the metals done.  I'm going with the studio scheme for Ivan with a few small tweaks, mostly the green shoulders to tie him in to the rest of the army.  The plan is to freehand a 5th Border Legion logo on the upper shell, but we'll see how that turns out.  The black should go pretty quick, just some sparse edge highlighting, leaving just the red and maybe a bit on the green.  It's possible I'll get him finished in the next session, though more likely it'll be two more sittings before he's done.  Not a bad turnaround for a jack though, especially with my slow painting speed.  While doing the green and red on Ivan I roughed those colors in on Irusk as well.  He has a ton of little fiddly details which will be great fun to do.  Hopefully I'll figure out how to highlight this green right by the time I get to that point, which will be after the flesh and maybe the metals as well.  Irusk will take much longer than Ivan but doesn't look to be horrible.  Of course the real hurdle will be the remaining WGI bits and Kovnik Joe, but one hurdle at a time.

A productive morning

Title says it all, I got some good stuff done this morning.  I sculpted two more frigate bases, which I wanted to get done in time for tonight so I could tell frigate squadrons apart.  I worked on the "case" for my humans, cutting actual holes for the frigates instead of just cramming them between layers.  I'm also in the process of printing out the Martyr rules to have on hand, since they'll be coming up in the near future.

I've been skewing towards terrain-heavy tables of late, so I wanted to go back the other way and have some more open tables.  With 9 islands (and one lonely rock), I have enough terrain to put out two sparseish tables worth of islands.  I only have one table cloth though, and that's EV's to boot, so I set out to Joann's to get some material for another cloth.  I'd take a picture of it, but I'll just wait until gaming tonight and get a picture of it then.  It's a light-ish blue/lighter-ish blue/white wavy pattern that I think looks a lot like a rough sea.  Since my frigate bases are very textured, which I'm going to call storm-tossed, so the wavy print is going to work out well I hope.  It's significantly lighter than EV's cloth so there'll be no getting the two mixed up.  Having the option to setup two tables could be useful tonight, and on Game Parlor nights in general, in case we have an excess of players and a deficit of table dressing.

In non-gaming news, I finally finished the latest Wheel of Time book, not quite a year after I got it.  I'll post up another list of things I hope to accomplish before the fall semester starts sometime, but that would have been the top item on the list and I can cross it off before even making the list, which is nice. 

Backlog part 2: Terrain wrap-up

This has taken far too long, considering the terrain has been finished for nearly two weeks now.  My last post about the islands saw them still pink and brown, waiting for some texture and paint.  I wanted to have them finished for the start of gaming at the FLGS on Monday, but my weekend was slammed, so I enlisted EV to help finish them off.  The first step was gathering materials, so we headed out to Walmart for paint and, perhaps, spackle.  It took much longer than I expected to have paint mixed up, with most of the time being Walmart's computer analyzing a paint swatch and coming up with the proper mixture for it.  I could understand if I was bringing in a teddy bear or blade of grass to have color matched, but I just plucked the swatch from the wall of samples there at Walmart, so you'd think they might have already had the formulas for those ready to go.  Such was not the case.  While we waited for the paint, EV and I discussed sealing the islands and how useful spackle would be.  I wanted some sort of reinforcement on the islands, but wasn't sure what kind.  EV had experience with spackle and said it wouldn't be much more durable than the foam itself, so in the end we decided to just go with the glue and paint that would eventually cover the islands.  If things didn't work quite like I expected, I could always make more.

Our list of materials from Walmart was as such:
Gorilla Glue - $4.50
2 shades of brown flat latex interior wall paint in smallish tubs (perhaps 2 quarts each) - $12 for both
Elmer's Wood Glue  - $3
2 shades of blue Apple Barrel acrylics in largish bottles (3-4 times as large as Vallejo bottles) - $4 for both
$23.50 total (with a bit of rounding)

Add this total with the $21 from the initial supply trip and the total layout was about $45.  As you'll see I ended up with 8 islands and one lonely rock, which puts each island at a little over $5.  This isn't bad in my book, but it's also not the whole story.  After we left Walmart, we headed back to EV's place to put some work in.  We covered the islands with streaks of the wood glue straight from the bottle, then used a brush and a bowl of watered down wood glue to spread the glue around into a mostly even layer except in places where I wanted to have a stone look.  Then we covered the islands in Woodland Scenics Fine Ballast and left them to dry.  Since I had work looming, this was the end of my involvement in the finishing of the islands, and also of my first hand knowledge of them, though I imagine EV will pop in and leave a comment to set straight anything I get wrong.  I imagine he put another coat of glue on the islands after the first dried, though perhaps not, then covered them in the darker brown latex paint.  After that dried, he probably hit them with the lighter brown latex paint, then added flock/static grass for the grassy areas.  He had a couple different kinds of flock and clumped foliage that makes up the bits of forest.  Somewhere around there he probably painted the rock bits black, then again with grey.  I'd guess the water was done last, mostly because that's how I'd do it.  That's about it, or so I imagine.

With all that in mind, you can see there are some hidden costs.  I was set to get some brushes at Walmart, but EV said he was covered, so there's another couple bucks.  EV also had all the flock and ballast, which saved a bit as well as the shakers of ballast are $10-12 a piece.  If you really want to dig deep, there's the black and grey paint as well, though any self respecting gamer will have large quantities of black and white paint on hand, and probably grey too.  I can safely add ~$25 to the total for materials I would have gotten if EV didn't have them at hand, so I'll round up and say $75 went into this project in one way or another.  That'd be not quite $10 per island, which wouldn't be nearly as good as $5 a piece.  But the other hidden factor here is how much I have left.  I may have used 1/4 of the hardboard and foam.  I haven't looked closely at the paint and glue to see how much is left, but the bag felt as heavy on the way to my house as it did when we left Walmart.  I can reasonably expect to get another 30 islands or so out of the materials I have on hand (assuming I get some ballast of course), which would bring the total to around $2 per island when everything is done, and that's pretty good in my book. 

As I've said before, this was my first attempt at making terrain of any kind.  It was a good learning experience, and I think the finished islands look pretty good too.  EV has been talking about doing taller islands with sheer cliff sides, which seems like a good idea.  I certainly have far more foam than hardboard.  I'd still like to do a lighthouse and some buildings/fortifications, and I've been thinking about pulling a dwarf mini from my pile to use as a big statue.  Best of all, we have a sea board to use for US, and one that's easy to pack into a box lid and take wherever the game is.  Now, finally, the pictures.

I think I may add a waterfall to this one where the crevice is.  I think I'd paint the area blue, then put a layer of Elmers on top for the water effect, though I may end up painting the glue blue as well.  Something for the future.

This one may get the waterfall treatment as well, as there's another crevice on the top layer here that doesn't really show up in the picture so well.

I really like the lonely rock.  I hope to use it to great effect in a game sometime.

This is the first island I made, and the largest of the bunch.

The rocky backside of the first island.

And a group shot of all of them on the carpet, because I didn't want to unfold the cloth all the way.

Terrain, part 3

Got the foam work finished up on the islands.  A couple pictures, because they say 1000 words.

I put a clothes pin in there for scale, as much as it helps.  From a different angle:

In trying to get these ready for the upcoming Game Parlor throwdown, I'm farming the finishing of these out to EV.  Sadly reading for class is going to take up most of my limited free time between now and Monday, so EV has graciously agreed to run with the torch from here.  Hopefully I can con him into taking some WIP shots as he goes.  Half-finished though they are, this is still the first terrain I've made, so seeing a table's worth of cover that I've made myself is rather satisfying.  I got a scouring pad from EV a couple days ago the help "sand" the foam.  You can see the difference between the island that wasn't scoured (on the far right) and the rest of them. 

Summer "break" retrospective

I had quite a list of things to do over the 2 weeks I had off between summer classes.  Some things got crossed off that list, most didn't.  A visual representation of what I didn't get done.




Painting
airship
krakens
flagship
pSorscha
Manhuntress
'jacks
WGI
other Khador

Reading
Wheel of Time
Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Maya

Other
Clear the DVR
US terrain
ID spreadsheet

That's a pretty sparse list.  I got my US painting done, and a start on terrain and spreadsheet, but there was nothing for Warmachine.  Reading was a disaster.  I managed the one book and got started (again) on the new Wheel of Time, hoping (again) to get it done before class started, but (again) running out of time.  It didn't help that I had school reading to do before class even started.  I did manage to watch some TV though, so there's that.  I'll have another 2-3 weeks between the end of this class and the beginning of the fall semester, so maybe I'll be able to cross a couple other things off.

Terrain, part 2

After a break for lunch and to let glue dry, I went back at it.  I'm trying to think of a good way to get the corner halves to join up into a single piece.  Dowels seem like a good choice, but I don't want a big hole in the side.  Magnets could work, but that seems like a lot of trouble to go to.  I'll continue to ponder.  In the meantime, I covered the first island in Elmer's to see how it would work out.  Like a lot of these glue pics, the picture doesn't really do a lot to convey what the piece actually looks like, but it's better than nothing I think

The glue didn't adhere too well to the top.  It kept running off like water on waxed paper.  In the future I'll scuff up any untouched edges to try and avoid this.  I had expected a noticeable layer of glue to form, but on further inspection it's kinda hard to tell that there was glue on it in the first place.  Obviously I have no idea whether this is normal or not.  As noted the tops were troubling, but the sides and edges all took a good layer.  I even made sure to work the glue into the crevices for maximum coverage.  I'd be hesitant to spray the piece down as it is for fear of melting it with the paint, but that's still a ways off.  I have to texture it still, and how I'll do that is also under consideration. 

In the meantime, I decided to make use of some of the scraps I had made in constructing the first island.  I put together a lonely rock.  I thought a frame of reference would be good, so I took a pic of the rock with the island and an ID cruiser.

The island is going to be fairly large, about as large as the largest island we currently use.  I want to do some real big islands with room for settlements and fortifications, maybe even a harbor, but I'm worried they'd take up too much table space.  Something 4-5 times the size of this island would be big enough for the scope of building I want, but it would also take up 1/4 of the table which seems like a bad thing.  Guess I'll add size considerations to the list.

I wanted to try out a two-tier island, so that's what I did.  I had originally thought about making an island with two peaks on it, but I thought it would be a little cluttered, so I went with a single peak.  The constituent pieces:

I trimmed down a toothpick, then ran it through the bottom tier.  I put some Liquid Nails on the peak, then stuck it onto the toothpick and squeezed the two together.  Then I glued the base and the island together.  This is the result/

I decided to do a little bluff on the island, so I rant he file around the back of it to create a harder edge.  I'm thinking of doing most of these as forested islands, so the bluff on this one would be a bare stone.  I took a picture of the bluff in particular, though looking at them now I think the above picture gives a better look at it.  Still, options never hurt.

I wanted to leave more room on the base for this one.  The base is a bit irregular though, so I'll keep that in mind for the next one.  The jigsaw doesn't really like to cut in curves, which leads to some of the irregularity.  All the same, I think I'll try a standard circular one next, or maybe a nice kidney shaped one.  I want to fit a lighthouse in somewhere, plus an island with a built-in wind direction tracker for when we actually have to worry about wind.  Plenty of ideas and lots of materials.

First crack at terrain

I scouted out Home Depot with EV yesterday and found they had both reasonably sized pieces of hardboard and pink insulation.  I went back this morning to get some supplies.  I got a 2'x4' piece of hardboard, a 2'x8' piece of pink insulation, some Liquid Nails, and an extendable utility knife.  I had been planning on getting a hot wire foam cutter, but after having watched a couple videos on Youtube I decided to give a knife a shot.  While not going bargain basement on this project, I do want to save money where possible, and a $3 knife instead of a $20 (at least I'd expect) hot wire cutter fits that bill. 


Costs incurred so far, with rounding for nice numbers:
$8 - pink insulation
$6 - hardboard
$3 - knife
$4 - Liquid Nails

$21 total

EV had been skeptical that I'd be able to fit the hardboard into my car.  I pointed out that I have a Matrix and can fold the seats down, but he told me he had issues with a station wagon.  We agreed to have a difference of opinions.  Much to my delight, not only did the hardboard fit easily, the pink foam fit all in once piece.  A bit of photographic evidence.

I have access to a jigsaw, so I picked that up on the way home.  My assembled materials:

I knew there was a folding work table hiding somewhere.  A bit of rummaging produced it, and a bit of head scratching got it set up.  There are these plastic clips that fit into holes around the top of the table to hold materials.  Unfortunately the holes were spaced in such a way that I couldn't hold down both sides of the hardboard, so I made do as best possible. 

There was a lot of vibration when cutting, but it went well enough.  I drew a line on the hardboard, then attempted to cur it out as best possible.  My first attempt:

I had this idea to make two corner islands that could fit together to make a side island.  With that in mind, I cut the other half of the island.  I must have flipped the first island when marking where to start the cut because the two halves didn't match up properly.  I had to flip one over, hence the different textures.

I didn't want to start with too many since this is my first attempt at making terrain, so I cut a final base in a standard anywhere-on-the-board style.

The edges were fuzzy and a little rough, so I took a file to them to smooth them out.  I rounded the edges a bit while I was at it.  It doesn't show so much in this picture, but they're a lot smoother and less jaggedy after the filing.

I decided to do the standard island first.  I traced the base onto the pink foam, then went at it with the knife.  I cut the rough shape from the larger sheet, then trimmed it down once I had that piece free.

I wanted to have a sloping beach side and a cliff side on this one, so I started working it with that in mind.  I made the long curving edge into the beach, while the more wavy side became the cliffs.  I cut the foam on an angle, taking out small slices and trying to keep the cuts as neat as possible.  Despite my best efforts, the piece quickly became somewhat ragged, so I took the file to it too.  I would have used sandpaper, but I didn't have any and didn't want to go out to get some.  The smoothed islands, plus tools.

A shot of the front, beach side on the base.  I wanted to have a ring of base around this side to have some water on the base, or maybe a more gradual transition to from island to beach to water.

And one of the back.  I ran the file vertically along the back here to put some erosion style cuts into the piece, which again don't show up so well.  I wanted this side of the island to come closer to the edge of the base to reinforce the sheer cliffs.

I was surprised to find that Liquid Nails packs their product like potato chips: half the package is air.  Once I got past that, I ran a bead around the edge and scribbled it across the middle, smearing it here and there.

Then I put the foam on the base and pressed.  It felt a little springy, so I put a weight on it.

That's a mostly empty can, but it still added some nice weight.  I left the piece to dry, and it has been for an hour or so now.  EV was advocating covering the whole thing in Elmer's glue, and I've seen other recommendations of drywall spackle (which I checked out at Home Depot, but the smallest one was a 12 pound tub), texture paint, and Polyfilla from the UK.  I have no idea what the American equivalent of Polyfilla is, and I don't really want to get a huge thing of spackle, so I'm considering either glue or texture paint.  I saw a similarly huge container of texture paint at Home Depot, but I'm wondering if I can't find it in more reasonable sizes at Michaels or AC Moore. 

Pre-F1 update

Been a quiet couple hobby days.  Played Monsterpocalypse and (the non-Xbox Live version of) Settlers of Catan for the first time on Friday.  Also got the next wave of reinforcements, or at least proxies for them.  It's a couple days early, but I was at the FLGS.  Finally got a set of Warmachine templates so I can stop relying on my opponent having them.  Went out today to take a look at hardboard and pink foam insulation to get an idea of what I'd be spending and what I'd be getting if I go in for making some islands.  Lowe's had ginormous sheets of hardboard, but I couldn't find the pink foam.  I'll try Home Depot on Monday and compare.  Looks like costs will be reasonable(ish) and I'll be able to scratch the terrain itch.  In worse news, a week and half is all I have before my next class starts.  Haven't made any progress on the Khador, but I've gotten a bit of reading in.  The new ships will get painted soon enough, then we'll see about WM or terrain.