As Promised...

Here be the piccies of my boards in action! Check out my post below for how I made them.


Minis: Bolt Action/Warlord Games Us Paratroopers
Buildings: PMC Games and Citadel (chapel)
Rock: scratch
Woods: scratch
Dykes: not sure but they came from Letham Craft Shop

 The Screaming Eagles enter the village, with Sherman in support

 Through the woods

Bazooka team covers the advance

 Mortars ready!!

 Infantry rush in to clear the street for the Sherman

 Staff Sergeant orders his men to take the giant dining chair sticking out of the road...

The medic

The street's pretty well covered

Taking cover

rumblerumblerumble

So yeah... messing about's fun. To be honest it's good to see how the board looks when it's populated, and I'm quite happy with the results. Wonder if it'd work for 15mm though...

It's quiet.... TOO quiet!

Yeah it's been quiet over here are Heavy Metal HQ although that doesn't mean I've been laying low! Far from it in fact.

I've just been really busy doing the stuff this blog is here to talk about to have time to talk about the stuff I've been doing... on... this... err... blog...


Anyway!

2 projects started, one almost finished, and of course my 101st Airborne are now gamable (is that a word?! Gameable? Gamible? Gullible?). Basically one of the projects is the aforementioned (second post) buildings!

The full set of buildings. In kit form. Just like real life, hey?

The "hotel" pub, with extension

3-in-a-row! Terraced cottages, fronts, backs, sides. 

So there it is. All the kits are ready to be cut out and stuck together with the balsa prisms to be cut and stuck in each corner! Then roofs; think I'll just go with cereal box card with a prism of balsa across the length of the building.

Next up... 

Inspired by an awesome article in Issue 279 of Wargames Illustrated (Jan '11) I decided I wanted to have a go at designing some modular town-y gaming boards with roads and all!

So a trip to B&Q later, I arrived with my squares of MDF salvaged fro mthe bargain bin and kindly chopped up in store. The cost??? A whole £2 for something about 4foot X 4foot. While there I picked up some grey paint, a sample pot of darker grey (the cost split with Neil McG for his project which I'll leave for him to reveal ^_^ ) I set to work!

The roads were marked so that they all connect, and the boards are all double-sided. I only have 4 just now, but I may well make more in the future. Here are the steps:

 First coat on Friday 15th, finished (2 coats on each side) Tuesday 19th.

This is today; when everything else happened!

 Roads pencilled in with my 1/50 Sherman for scale

 Blocked in a tarmac colour. Sample pot with a little Chaos Black

 Space Wolves Grey kerb with permanent marker, Skull White road markings (I think I'll leave at that, so they are pretty generic)

 Another possible layout (note the "Town Centre" and "Dead End")

And another. Herman just loves trundling up and down those roads!

God I love holidays! They're great, I get stuff done! Wish I could have holidays all the time.



I then posed up a board with some buildings to get some flavour shots, using my 101st! ^_^

I'll post 'em in a separate entry though as I've got a few piccies of that!

Updates...

Well it's been a quiet couple of days... but I've been busy! When I've not been building garden arches I've been painting up my Screaming Eagles which are coming on... nearly done... They're OK but I could do so much better...


Anyway here's some pics of one of my other projects, just to keep you all entertained.

 Using the Destroy All Monsters rules (free!) I hope to one day recreate the greatest giant monster movies of all time! Here's the Big G with his arch nemesis... King Ghidorah

And a Big G on the verge of meltdown against Destoroyah (all from that movie)

Shopping can be such a drag sometimes...

So, these figures (about 2.5 inches tall) would sit comfortably against 2mm tanks! Now, to make some small trees for said tanks to hide in, here's a step-by-step guide to making easy, cheap forests for 2mm! Awesome!

 Plasticard is cut into equal squares and then based. Green pipe cleaners are then chopped and superglued onto. Finall, the whole thing is sprayed brown, and the base given a brown ink wash. Gnarly!

Here's what it eventually looks like. Notice how the spray didn't obscure the green, but just muted it? Radical!

Currahee part 2

Well, since it's all-day gaming bonanza next Saturday at Forfar I should get my posterior in gear and get these paras painted!

The plan is to spray them with Humbrol Grass Green, brown ink and then begin a highlight layering of progressively lighter tan and hopefully that should be it, picking out details etc.


While I'm at it might get some of these Deep Ones done too! ^_^ (blubblubblubblub)Something to help those who have NO idea what I'm talking about :P



2130 Update:


So it was a gorgeous day... and yet I needed painting done! So what's the solution????

Music, sun, paints, and water.... pity it wasn't beer but hey.

Right, sprayed grass green, and left inked brown. 

The uniform's pretty much finished now. Just need to paint up the knee and elbow pads, and do all the attached fluff, and then move onto faces, then weapons, then bases ^_^ so all going well these should be finished by end of week.

Think I'll cheat and buy some transfers though...

Currahee!

Well, my 28mm 101st Airborne dropped in their LZ (aka the space behind the letterbox) yesterday so another project for hte Easter Hols. Figures by Warlord (Bolt Action) and they look mighty fine.

The box gives you enough for what I believe would be a fairly standard platoon:


1 officer
1 serg with M1
1 Medic
1 Radioman

2 sergs (M1 carbine and Thomson)
8 troopers
2 man LMG
3 man mortar
2 man bazooka

21 in total giving... what... a platoon with 2 squads and then 4 fireteams? Does that sound about right?

Next up, gotta get me a puckle of Pathfinders with those famous mohawk 'dos! :D

I expect these dudes to see action in plenty theaters from standard WWII to this Weird War II (if Gordon actually manages to persuade me... ps can I use a VOTOMS mecha model instead of the official ones?) to Mythos Minis and beyond. Oh not to mention Doctor Who too! Imagine the Doctor landing in the middle of Bastogne where the Allies are locked in a desparate battle with two types of Nazis; the typical squishy ones and a slightly more crunchy ones resembling large dustbins with flashy lights and...

Mecha!

Well... no thanks to Gordon Yakomine instilling a rush of butterfly fever across the club with the (quite frankly, utterly WIN!) Mechwarrior Clix I now have more than I know with what to do, except arrange them admire my big force of stompy robots, rediculously awesome vehicles and tiny but deadly infantry.

Left: Dragon's Fury, which were going to be my secondary force... until a certain evilbay auction

Right: Highlanders. Still my faves... just. Must now get more. 

Fave Mecha at the moment- the Goshawk. The formula goes like this:

named after a raptor + looks like a dragon = greater than awesome 

Actually, I had a game with Neil McG at the Kirrie club last night: a whopping 900 point battle without the usual tournament constraints (so that meant BIIIIIG table, LOOOOOOOTS of scenery and deciding on a LOS rule rather than the norm... so the heights of the buildings were actually different rahter than being representative of one height...) which was very fun (reminded me of my younger days spending way too long on Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 or Tiberian Sun).

Game was pretty close I'd say. I'd wasted one of his mechs, first blood with my Dragon's Fury Goshawk, as well as taken out a monocycle, but he'd reduced two of my mechs to little more than walking scrapheaps who were interested only in getting out of there. Another turn may well have spelled their doom! Very fun though! Even for the sheer visual value of it; it looked absolutely beautiful if I may say so: Neil's perfectly desert-coloured House Liao against my (admittedly gaudy in comparison) factory grey and burgundy duking it out over the outskirts of a desert city... or an oil company or...

Anyway Neil got some piccies so check his Blog for 'em. Maybe I'll swipe some and stick them on here too. :)

1: Shadow Over Aberinnes

To tie in with a small force for the DWMG- themed Mythos Miniatures I have decided to build a small Scottish fishing village to compliment my small force of Deep ones: Aberinnes, twinned with the New England town of Innsmouth... obviously!

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about (and enjoy a good vintage horror story!) Might I point you in the direction of the truly genius Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his excellent short The Shadow over Innsmouth. Definitely worth a read! Buildings will be made from mounting paper from Letham Craft Shop... which I expect will be recieving more of my money in the future... and some rather cunningly-rendered paper templates. Pics below will be for rows of charming wee cottages that hide a hidden, lurking, squamous terror! 2-floor builings, a pub, shop and Masonic hall to hold meetings of the Order of Dagon will follow, and of course I'm hoping to have these to be useful for any period from 1920s right up til now.

About right I hope... Standard 28mm figure (can anyone guess where from?). Of course I'll be combining 3-terraced  and 2-terraced cottages, as well as the aforementioned 2-floor buildings. Then probably slap either glue and sand or polyfilla on 'em and paint them up bright, jolly coastal buildingy colours... or not...

THon First Yin!

Well I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and finally get my own Blog started up. Been toying with the idea on and off for a while now but at least I've finally decided to get on with something. Well... Since I'm on holidays for around 2 weeks it's a good a time as any to fire up the machine. Let's hope it carries on!


To follow will be a puckle of entries detailing some projects I'm hoping to get going underway, as well as a couple already on the go.