Monday 11 November 2013

Wet Paint: Arthur

IMG 1543

This is a Foundry Arthur (one of many in my collection :) ) which has been on and off my painting desk for a couple of years now. In a bid to clean out the painting queue before my move, I finished painting him yesterday evening. This figure was painted in full–on–four–layers–with–knobs–on style (it goes to 11)—deliberately so to see if I could still do it. This of course takes time so I have generously awarded myself 5 points for painting it.

I plan on finishing the basing of this figure and then selling it (Ebay or through some forums). With the current popularity of Saga and Dux Britanniarum it should hopefully fetch a good price.

Tuesday 5 November 2013

Flexible artillery (re)basing

I ran into a problem when setting up my wargame table for a new game the other day:

IMG 1528

The scenario I'm setting up (one from CS Grant's excellent Scenarios for Wargamers) calls for a number of redoubts and I wanted to provide for the option of deploying a cannon in one of said redoubts. As the discerning reader can no doubt infer from the picture above, the artillery base in question is too big for the redoubt (and yes, the gun is not put on the base correctly - that is not the point of this post :) ).

So I came up with this idea:

IMG 1533

This is of course nothing revolutionary, and in all probability I am not the first wargamer to do this, but it is pretty neat nonetheless. On top of the an MDF base, I glue a layer of thin 'paper steel' (I get mine from the tastefully named Tiny Tin Troops). This is then terrained with my basing gunk (Pumice Gel with brown dye added) but some space is left ungunked to accommodate the bases of the crew members (which are now also individually based on magnetic bases) and a smaller area to accommodate my standard Nd magnet on the bottom of the gun carriage. I am then free to put all figures on the base for normal deployment, take the gun off to limber it, or take everything off for those special cases, such as deployment in BUA's or redoubts.

All together, this is the result in based version for normal deployment (basing of course to be finished):

IMG 1529

In redoubt mode:

IMG 1530

And the base itself without occupants:

IMG 1531