Tavern Staff of the Blue Wolf Inn

Every town needs a tavern. And Gierburg is no exception! So today I would like to show you the lovely couple that own's the fine Blue Wolf Inn, that I painted. Both miniatures are from Black Cat Bases.

First, Stilhoufen, the owner. Judging by his looks, he may very well have spent some time at sea.

Up next, his lovely wife Bertha, a female cook:

I wanted to add a little extra to the miniature, to justify it's annoyed expression. I thought that maybe someone has spilled some of Bertha's stew/soup, and now she's coming after him/her with that pan of her's.

I wanted to give the spilled soup a little texture so I used some VMC Arena Oscura + VMC Smoke, which I let dry for a little while to make it thicker, and addded some very fine sand to it. I stippled the mixture on the base and on the pan and let dry. Then I applied a generous wash of GW Chestnut ink.

The staff in front of the Blue Wolf Inn:


That's it for today!
I hope you enjoyed this little update. Stay tuned for more.

-Tom

Yitu Interview about Mordheim and BTB

Blogger Yitu recently did an interview with Tom and myself about Mordheim and Border Town Burning. You can read it now on his blog. His blog is mostly in German, but I suggested making the interview in English - for whatever it's worth.

There's some interesting stuff on Yitu's blog, by the way. I especially recommend checking out his interview with Steven Savile, author of the Warhammer novels Curse of the Necrarch and Vampire Wars.

So much for now. Tom, will be back soon with more Gierburg goodness. I am currently putting the finishing touches on the Warhammer Forge from Forge World, so that one will be up soon as well¹.

Til then

___________________________________
¹Update: Check out the finished forge here.

Citizens of Gierburg: Torturer and Jailer

Hi, everybody! This is Tom reporting for Cianty's Tabletop Wargames Blog. I was recently invited by Chris to join his Gierburg project.


A (very) brief introduction to Gierburg

For those who may not know what it is: Gierburg is a tabletop game that is currently being developed by Chris, revolving around a great variety of skirmish-size missions in a cloak and dagger setting with subtle (but undeniable) elements of magic and mystery. What sets Gierburg apart from your run-of-the-mill hack-and-slash tabletop skirmish game, is its use of combat and its character-based setup (which involves RPG elements). Combat is a tool amongst others that players need to use wisely to reach their mission objective. Hence, characters in Gierburg have a variety of skills, feats and attributes that are equally important, depending on the challenges they face, not necessarily related to fighting, but also to moving, sneaking, talking and whatnot.


Painting minatures for Gierburg
- By "Boring" Tom

My involvement with Gierburg lies with making sure that all things with two or more legs are properly coloured and look "alive". In other words, I do the painting of all Gierburg models.

Here I will be presenting my latest creations. I will be posting the citizens of Gierburg that I am painting as I go, in a logbook-like manner (as some of you may remember from Cianty's LotHS Redbeard's Sea Dogs project that I painted).

Let me start off with Norris the Torturer and Scrote the Jailer, both from Heresy Miniatures.

Norris the Torturer

Scrote the Jailer

As with most Gierburg dwellers, I wanted colours to be brownish and organic. Loads of leather, rope and iron. I think this came out rather well here. The yellow cheese and the glowing incandescant metal rod (better not get into what this thing is for...) add a little colourful detail to the minis I think.

You may also notice the little triangles on the mini's bases. I added these for field-of-view-related reasons which will become apparent once the rules are published.

That's from me for today. I hope you like these two guys!

Check back soon, when I unveil the next two miniatures on the list.
Take care!

-Tom

The Burgomeister's Mansion Pt. 3: The finished Model

Here is the last instalment of my Governor's Mansion report. After the review in part 1 and the modifications in part 2, I now present some info on how I painted the building along with some colourful photos at last.


Colours and Techniques
I chose a similar colour scheme to the one I used for the Blue Wolf Inn and other buildings such as the stable. I certainly don't want all my Gierburg buildings to look the same but for this one I did want the same colours as for the inn.
Especially for the roofs I think its nice to have a coherent colour scheme. It ties the buildings together and makes them look as "one" on the tabletop.



Timber
After showing off the Blue Wolf Inn on the Gidian-Gelände Forum, it was suggested that timber frames should probably be darker to imply weathering. Looking at the inn now the timber is probably too bright indeed. So for this house I only used:

• Drybrush with Scorched Brown
• Drybrush with mixes of increasing amounts of Skull White

To set the door apart from the timber frame I drybrushed an additional layer of Bestial Brown after the initial Scorched Brown. This makes the door brighter than the other wood, which seems reasonable to me, because I don't think the burgomeister would want the door of his mansion to be weathered and brittle.



I am pretty happy with the result. Careful drybrushing works really well on this model, because the wood grain on the beams is so nicely modelled.


Wattle and daub
Basically I chose the same colours for the wall filling as for the Blue Wolf Inn. The model suggests that the mansion was built with wattle and daub. I painted the wattle as follows:

• Drybrush with Bestial Brown
• Drybrush with Snakebite Leather
• Drybrush with Vomit Brown
• (Drybrush with Bleached Bone)

I left off the last step for the wattle on the first floor, because on the ground floor I found it to look too bright with the Bleached Bone on top.


Floor
The idea for the floor came from the amazing interor by Stony B. On the ground floor I first applied a heavy drybrush with Dark Flesh, then carefully dabbed the floor with: Tanned Flesh, Elf Flesh, Vomit Brown, Fortress Grey, Skull White, Chaos Black. Lastly, I used various washes of some of these paints.

I was mostly content with the result, but for the first floor I took even more time and dabbed more carefully, using the following colours (in that order): Tanned Flesh, Dwarf Flesh, Bleached Bone, Fortress Grey, Vomit Brown and Elf Flesh on the floor. At the end a dabbed heavily watered down mixes of the above colours (mostly Grey, Bone and Flesh).

Drybrush with Dark Flesh

Dabbing Tanned Flesh

Dabbing Dwarf Flesh

The finished Mansion
And now the finished model at last (click on photos to enlarge):

The Burgomeister's Mansion Pt. 2: Pimp My Home

Welcome to part 2 of my extended report about my experience with the Governor's Mansion resin model. The first part was a review of the model, this time I present the changes and modifications I made to make it look better and more interesting.
You can see some WIP photos and read a bit of discussion on Tom's Boring Mordheim forum and Gidian-Gelände.


Walls
To make the inside more interesting, I cut walls out of foamboard to put in the model. Foamboard works nicely for this because it can be cut far more easily than sawing plywood. I applied a mix of white wall paint and sand to the wall to give it structure. I made three walls in total: one for the ground floor and the stairs (see further below) and two for the first floor.

Two of the wall sections are meant to end in the room instead of dividing it, so I used square wooden sticks for the wall endings:



Door
One of the walls on the first floor needed a door. I went with one of a couple spare resin doors I had lying around from Antenociti's Workshop. The problem was that I wasn't using the door on the outside of some closed building, so inside the house the door is accessible/visible from both sides. However, these doors are not modelled on both sides. I decided to glue one on each side of the wall. This obviously doesn't quite work with the door handle and hinge. So on one of them, I had to remove the knob and re-attach it, and remove the frame and put it where the bottom used to be:

The converted door

Stairs
As I said, I wasn't happy with the missing stairs between the two levels. I spent a lot of time pondering where to place stairs. Nothing seemed to really fit as the stairs were either directly in front of a window or somewhere in the middle of the room where it made no sense. I considered using a ladder instead to save space, even a trap-door. I finally decided for the most exhausting method at the least unlogical position...

I drilled and filed a hole through which stairs would lead up to from the ground floor. The stairs are from Pardulon; I bought them at this year's Hamburger Tactica convention.



Creating the hole was a time-consuming, arduous and nerving process. The floor is incredibly massive and I do wonder why Resina Planet wastes so much resin on it.



Interior & Falderal
Additional items like furniture, bed and books (from Thomarillion) and candles (from Olley's Armies, now out of production) enhance the model a lot. For photos of them, check back next week when I present the finished mansion.

The first floor WIP (note the stairs marker)

Up next: Photos of the finished building at last.