Sometimes the wind changes, and you have to go with it

The last couple of weeks I've been feeling the ever changing cycle of my painting ebbing down to a 'slow' period again. To wit, January saw me paint 61 points, February 39 and March 27 points of figures. You can extrapolate yourself.

Not a big deal really. I've been doing this toy soldier malarkey long enough now to recognise this as normal, so I was resigned to a period of less output and waiting for the muse to strike again. Then suddenly, more or less out of the blue, I decided to try a different tack and started putting together plans to put up a 6mm Cold War game (as an aside, 6mm is of course the One True Scale for this period :) ).

And suddenly the pace picked up again. I painted some tiny tanks and have spent the last few evenings putting together scenery for the game (tentatively—i.e. only in my mind—planned for next Wednesday). This is the table as it stands (minor details will change for the game, I'm sure), representing the fictional Semmel valley that will be the scene of the fighting:



The area between the two forks of the Semmel River (the Kleine and Grosse Semmel, of course) will become an industrial estate, which is currently in the process of being built:





And finally, here are four village bases also under construction:



All in all, a pleasant way to spend a few evenings :)

Horses, carts and wheels

So I've been steadily working on some horse and musket armies, notably Great Northern War Swedes and Russians and Napoleonic Bavarians. The past few days, I've turned my attention to what might be termed their _support infrastructure_:



That's only just the start. So far, there's a Hovels Dutch wagon with two possible loads (I'll make a third out of coffee stirrers), a Foundry cart and powder cart and two Old Glory _wurstwagen_. The latter have either Foundry crew (for the one without horses) or Old Glory crew with Foundry Bavarian heads transplanted (ouch). Still to come are another cart and powder cart, some caissons (they'll be French crewed) and limbers and horse teams. Obviously, some of these will be more suitable for the Napoleonic than the GNW collection, but there will be a fair bit of overlap.

These bases can be used as baggage train, to generally doll up the battlefield or to provide some 'meat' behind a deployed artillery battery.

Building fortifications - part 1

I'm planning on doing a game on the battle of Holowczyn soonish. One of the main features of that battle, apart from the insane opposed river crossing into a marsh by the Swedish, were the fortifications thrown up by the Russian infantry. So I decided I needed some of those and started building.

Fortifications in the early 18th Century (Holowczyn was fought in 1708) - and much of the 'Black Powder' era at that - probably consisted of gabions, lenghts of plashing and whatever woody bits were at hand. Well, that or what I happened to have at hand, which was:



The idea is that the further along the fortifications, the more hurried they become. So first there's gabions, then wood logs and branches stacked between stakes, then just logs stacked. The Russian army at Holowczyn was of course much more prepared and dug in than that, but sometimes historical reality has to bow to the rigors of time and bits availability :).

Building a river - the story goes on

So, just to refresh your memory, after [building](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000394.html) and then [basepainting it](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000396.html), the river was left at this stage:



The next stage is painting the river itself. I want to build a typical large European river (like the Maas or the Rhine), which are more often grey/green/brownish in colour than blue. I remember staying near the Rhine at St. Goarshausen a few times as a kid on holiday with my parents and wanted to use the color of the river there as a reference. So, a quick Google later, I came up with this picture, graciously snarfed off of someone's holiday pictures:



Greenish, brownish tints were called for. I already had a pot of light brown paint used in previous terrain projects (the actual color is Histor 6376 which for some reason is called Survival but is actually brown) but for the greenish tints I went down to the hardware store and picked up two tester pots of a dark and a light green (Dulux Forest and Olive green, if you're interested). To paint the river, I dabbed thick spots of the dark and light green onto the river surface:



The light green is actually almost a light grey as you can see. While these spots or swatches were still wet, I painted over them with the light brown that had been mixed with some of the dark green, so that the green spots still show up as streaks in the finished river. This gives a pleasing, somewhat realistic tone in just a few minutes' work (the six pieces took me just over 10 minutes):



That finishes the painting of the river itself. Next are the banks and stones, and then a gloss varnish layer over the river bed that will finish the boards.

Nelson's column at Trafalgar (and some extras)

As promised, here are the photos (notice that I was too lazy to remove my kitchen table from the photo :) ):





Additionally, here's todays workbench pic:



For some reason, these already look the part, even though there's only two colours of paint on them. I'm doing these a full regiment of 24 figures at a time - I'm curious to know where my upper 'army painting' limit lies.

Work in progress: British fleet at Trafalgar

The unresolved black blobs in the picture below are the second batch of my Trafalgar figures, the British:



They're cleaned and primed and have just been glued to magnetic sheets (some magnetic tokens I got way back at a Napoleonic game). They'll probably be painted in two batches, one batch being Collingwood's column and the other Nelson's column, _Africa_ and the frigates.

After that, as the Swedes have not arrived yet (though it seems that Bill from Musketeer has every reason to be behind on his mail order) and the Bavarians have, I might well paint up the first Bavarian battalion. Or the Orc Uncharted Seas fleet. Or some more Romans. Or some Swedish vignettes. Enough work :)