Paint Table Sunday - Slow but steady progress

During the week I painted a modern trooper for my Mordern Warfare side project but actually I'm still busy with terrain pieces namely ruins.

Since last week I worked on the outer walls and more or less finished them. Thus I started with the stones themselves and after painting them with dark red I drybrushed them with different brownish red colours. Finally a slight wisp of 'Pale Sand' to outline the edges of the stones and to connect them to the plastered parts of the walls which I drybrushed with different beige colours as well.

Although I've got window frames for the ruins as well I decided to turn my attention to some interior fitting first. For both ruins there are pieces of plank flooring to be painted and some storey floors as well. So I started with those pieces today and drybrushed the planks with different brown and beige colours to enhance the wonderfully carved out wood grain.

Since we'll need my two ruins for another game of Bolt Action next week I'll try to complete the next step until then. We'll see...

Until then please don't forget to have a look at the Google+ community dedicated to 'Paint Table Saturday'.

Enjoy your weekend!

Example ruined wall finished

As mentioned in the Paint Table Saturday post I've been working on some ruins lately. Actually for our Plancenoit club project but more or less for my own collection as well. So finally last Sunday morning I set up the airbrush equipment and spent two hours with spraying twelve horses for two British limber teams and two ruined buildings I assembled last week.

After lunch I started to paint one of the ruined wall pieces to experiment with different colours for the bricks and the plastered parts of the walls. The final result for the first pieve is this:

Actually I'm really happy with the result. I applied Vallejo Model Air (VMA) 'Hemp' as base colour for the plastered areas by airbrush and drybrushed it with Vallejo Model Color (VMC) 'Stone Grey' and 'Pale Sand' afterwards. For the bricks I used VMA 'Hull Red' as base colour and accented with different shades of red-brown tones. E. g. VMC 'Cavalry Brown' and VMC 'Red Leather'. Finally I gave them a light dust of VMC 'Pale Sand' to underline the edges of the bricks and to create a blending to the plastered area.

During the next days I'll work on the other pieces and I'll try to get some WIP steps photographed if you are interested in them.

Paint Table Saturay - Ruins

Huzzah! It's weekend again! Finally!

Two weeks to go until we'll have our crazy one day trip to Waterloo but somehow that's putting me into the right mood for preparing my part of our club's great 2015 Plancenoit game. Besides a couple of lancers I promised to build at least two ruins for the embattled village. Those are currently on my workbench to be assembled during the next days:

Once again I went for the kits from the wonderful range of Stronghold Terrain. Both are interpretations of buildings fitting into Belgium or Normandy more or less. Therefore perfect addition to my own collection because I'll be able to use them for Napoleonics as well as WW1 and WW2 games. Both houses come with plaster and resin parts and are qualitatively outstanding. Well sculpted and cast in absolute superior quality. Excellent stuff from Elmar and Mirco!

One of the ruins was published a short while ago and Elmar this crazy fellow made a diorama upgrade kit for it. Another 24 resin parts including floor tiles, stairs, windows, wallpapers and other wonderful stuff. It'll be a lot of work to include that but I'm looking forward to this experience.

Enjoy your weekend !

Dark Ages Pit House finished.

Last week I finished a model that I started a couple of weeks ago. Somehow with terrain building I'm even slower than with painting. Anyway finally The pit house for my Dark Ages village is completed:

It's one of the wonderful resin kits Stronghold Terrain produces. Elmar and Mirco have an excellent range of buildings which were modelled on buildings within a German outdoor museum.

The kit includes a solid and wonderfully sculpted baseplate, the six or seven part building and two straps of teddy fur to tile the roof with. All the pieces were cast crisp and clear and needed literally no cleaning. They fitted very well and I used two-component adhesive to glue everything together. Except of the roof to simplify putting figures inside.

As usual I painted the house with Vallejo Model Colors. Afterwards I applied different sorts of static grass, flowers and clumb foliage to top the base off.

Judge the result yourselves but I'm pretty satisfied with it. It's a nice company for the Dark Ages cottage I built last year and most likely I'll add some more buildings to the village. Momentarily I've got other projects to bring forth but at least a wonderful furnace is lurking around my lead pile...

Dark Age Cottage finished !

After an enjoyable saturday with a great game of Saga (AAR will follow soon) I found some time on sunday to sit down at the painting table and work a bit on my Dark Ages cottage. For some time I had both unexpected and appreciated help:

Viktoria will turn 4 this August and seeing me at the painting desk has been fascinating for her since her youngest days. She always wants to "help" me or paint some figures on her own and with some old remains of my lead mountain I let her do as she wants. Anyway she helped me with some terrain pieces already and spread sand on them or easy tasks like this. But this weekend we took the gloves off. First I let her slather the teddy fur for the roof of the cottage with white glue and on sunday she helped my to put a dark brown whash (Armypainter Strong Tone) on the coloured fur. Of course I'm still carefull which tasks to grant her but this weekend our joint work went really good.

So only a few finishing touches for me to do. Actually I stuck to Mirco's excellent painting tutorial for the Dark Age barn, at least as close as possible. Teddy fur was a completely new material for me so this it has been an interesting experience to work with this stuff. Actually it is much easier to use than I thought.

Besides this I didn't use anything too special: As always the reliable paints from Vallejo's Model Colour range, some Armypainter washes, pigments, my homemade terrain colour and different grass tufts, moss patches, some clump foliage and some static grass.

Really I like the result of my humble work. But that's mostly due to the excellence of the kit. The parts were well cast, needed only little cleaning and fitted very well. Actually there was no need to fill any gaps or to correct warped pieces. The resin was excellent to paint which can sometime be a problem.

All things considered the kit is really worth the 36€ Stronghold Terrain is charging for it. For value you get a great kit which is not only technically done well but historically accurate. Remarkably Mirco and Elmar sculpt their models strictly after examples they found reconstructed in open air museums. So I will gladly build up my Dark Ages village with some of their nice houses. Next on my workbench is the pit house which I bought earlier this year. My charming apprentice and I already started...