British Unrated Cutter from Games of War

The British Unrated Cutter "Fly" 1763 from Games of War is the latest addition to my shipyard. In this blog post I describe the painting and building process of the vessel, its sails and other accessories.

Tutorial: Painting Stonework

In this article I describe the way I paint stonework on my models. From cobblestone streets to the walls of medieval houses - they all are painted following this recipe.

First off, as with all artistic things there is not the one right way to do things. Stones come in endless variations of colour and shape and there are many ways to paint them. Over the years I have developed (or let's say, I got used to) a certain technique that creates results which I am quite happy with (even though "technique" makes it sound more complicated and elaborate than it actually is, as you will shortly see). Since questions about how I paint stones come up frequently, I decided to write this detailed tutorial for reference. I hope it can serve as a little inspiration or helper when painting your own stonework models. Let's start!

The Port of Gierburg - Part 4: Dock Section II Ground Level WIP

After completing the first section of my Port of Gierburg gaming table it is time to start with the second module. This one will be a lot more difficult and a lot more exciting. Due to its complexity I will handle the (under)ground level first and then tend to the rest later.

Similar to the first module this one is based on a solid 5mm MDF board. Following my initial plans (see Part 1) it measures 45cm x 72cm.

The concept for the port modules with two dock sections encapsulating a water board

Building a little Lantern

In this short tutorial I describe an easy way of making a lantern using remains from the bits box.

Lamps and lanterns add a lot to the atmosphere of the gaming table. Unfortunately though, while lamp posts are available from a number of producers (e.g. Yeoman Models, Grand Manner, Thomarillion, GeBoom) I could not find a supplier for humble lanterns. So I decided to build one...

Painting the Coaching Inn

Following up on my review of the Coaching Inn from Tabletop World I now present the finished piece.

As I mentioned in my review the Coaching Inn does not require assembling: other than cleaning up the piece all you need to do is glue the two chimneys to the roof and glue the fence/balustrade on the balcony.

The Scratch-built Balustrade

Speaking of the balustrade: I am not too keen on the fence that comes with the building. It looks too gothic/fantasy for my taste - I prefer a slightly more conservative/low-key style. Because of that I chose to build a new balustrade from wooden sticks.

Comparison of the original balustrade and my scratch-built one

Painting the Inn

The painting process was pretty much the same as with my previous Gierburg buildings. And it was a long one! With all the details the building has, tending to each shingle of the roof and each stone of the walls and - the most tedious work of all - painting all the windows with their grating, I can't count the many hours that went into this building. But it makes it only all the more satisfying once you are finished with the piece, lean back and look at it...

The finished Coaching Inn

Finally, this is what the completed Coaching Inn looks like:

Gangs fighting it out in the streets of Gierburg

A firebrand speaking to a mob of Gierburg peasants
from the balcony of the coaching inn

The Port of Gierburg - Part 3: Dock Section I Painted & Extras

In the previous instalment I described the building process of the first dock section for my Port of Gierburg project. Today I am going to show the finished piece, give a few painting hints and discuss extra pieces.

Painting the dock section

Painting the dock section was pretty straight forward and similar to my last stoneworks on the Town House and House Fronts. It's all about applying different greys (with brown, black and "bone") and some green and brown washes and pigments. I really enjoy painting stonework because you can get "all dirty", try out a lot of things and rarely do anything wrong in the process.

The main colours I used are Vallejo's Sand Light, Flat Earth and Neutral Grey from the Model Color range, plus a bottle of cheap black that I have been using for years. Mixing these colours basically gives you all you need. For the finishing touches I used watered down dark green and Devlan Mud (from Games Workshop).

I am very happy with the plaster cobblestones from Vampisol: they paint up rather nicely and look great as a large area. As usual I spent a lot of time painting individual stones which is the key to the effect.

Top view of the cobblestone from Vampisol

Trade Goods

The nicest half-timbered house is still just a boring sight when placed on an empty board all by itself. Adding bits such as barrels, crates and sacks to the gaming board goes a long way in making the table more interesting.

For habour scenes Ainsty Castings has a variety of very nice scenery items in their Tade Goods range.

Trade goods from Ainsty Castings

Similar items are available from Tabletop-Art: I bought the Stacked boxes and barrels set 2.

Stacked boxes and barrels set from Tabletop-Art

Compared to the Ainsty bits the Tabletop-Art pieces are much smaller. Especially the barrel stack (see photo, in the middle) appears somewhat tiny, although it is of course perfectly legitimate to have smaller barrels than the average 28mm scenery (funnily, the set is explicitly tagged as 30mm scale).

From the rabble-rousing leader of the Gierburg peasants I had a few MaxMini.eu crates left that I painted up.

A bunch of crates from MaxMini.eu

Now while I'm at it, I might as well mention the other products I either use or plan on purchasing:

• Crates and sacks from Antenocitis Workshop (see here)
• Barrels and crates from Pardulon (see here again)
• Crates, corn sacks and barrels from Stronghold Terrain (see sacks here)
• Groceries and Supplies from Tabletop World
• Rope coils from Black Cat Bases (among a lot of other things)
• Ship's Kit (GOW-SA001) and Small AnchorS (GOW-SA006) from Games of War's Pirate Supplies range

Animals

Lastly, I finally used a cat and a mouse from the Dog, Cats, Mice (ACK011) set by Mirliton (see: Historical 25-28mm > Medieval > Accessories). I really like this set a lot with its characterful animals and highly recommend it.

Stronghold Terrain also has an animal set and I will definately want to add that to my collection of beastly citizens of Gierburg.

Scratch-built jetty

I extended the built-in GrandManner jetty by scratch-building a similar piece. Bascially it is the same thing as the gallows I did years ago, comprising of many coffee stirring sticks.

First, I build a frame for the jetty. The length was chosen to accommodate the Ainsty ships.

The construction is rather simple but took me pretty long to build nonetheless. The jetty consists of 88 coffee sticks cut to length. To give wood constructions like this a finely detailed look I find it important to do some work on the wooden bars. I filed the edges of each stick to give them an irregular cut-to-size appearance.

After glueing the sticks on the frame I used the spike of a compass to poke two holes near the end of each bar to give the impression of nail holes.

From the GrandManner harbour kit I had six bollards left (two per kit) that I could use for this large jetty. The bollards come with small slits meant for the GrandManner resin jetty piece's overlapping bars. I filled them with putty and then glued them to my jetty.

Painting was the usual drybrushing job with browns, greys and bone white.

The finished dock section

Now finally for some photos of the finished piece:

I set up the board with ships (the Old Glory Brigantine and Games of War's Sea Dog and two Sea Pup tenders) and buildings (fronts and Town House). Figures are Gierburg Peasants and Bounty Hunters painted by Simon Bradley.

Up next: Part 4: Dock Section II

The Port of Gierburg - Part 2: Dock Section I WIP

In the second part of this series I describe the building of the first big dock section for the Port of Gierburg gaming table.

Building the Docks

With the water board finished work on the Port of Gierburg continues with the first dock section. Basically this section will consist of three sets of harbour walls from GrandManner that I bought some time ago. Each set consists of various resin parts: a wall piece, a jetty, stairs and a flagstone board.

The Harbour wall/jetty
from the GrandManner online store (ME64)

Following my plans for the port set-up (see Part 1) the first dock section measures 75 x 12 cm. The harbour walls have a width of 31 cm so I had to do some filing to get them in the right sizes. Unfortunately (in this case!) the resin that GrandManner uses to cast their pieces is rock solid so it took me really long to file through the walls.

The plan was to incorporate two stairs and one jetty into the dock. I filed off the lower steps of the stairs so that they would fit nicely next to the jetty. The jetty also had to be cut to size. I could have used the jetty in full length, of course, but I want to be able to place three ships in the port and I have certain plans for additional jetties. This required the jetty section here to be rather short.

Like with the water board I used a 5 mm MDF board as a base. The rest was a lot of styrofoam.

I glued a beech moulding strip to the bottom where the dock would touch the water board. To stabilize the sides and to prevent them from damage I used thin wood boards.

I filed the corners of the wood boards so that they matched the stonework pattern of the harbour walls. Later, I would use modelling putty to fill the gaps and create a smooth surface.


Instead of the flagstone boards that come with the harbour walls I decided to use cobblestone boards from Vampisol. As I described in an earlier review these are very nice plaster boards that I highly recommend. I chose to use them over the resin flagstone pieces because the thin plaster boards can be easily cut into shapes so that they can be combined to create a big seamless surface.

Plaster boards with stretcher bond pattern from Vampisol

The Vampisol boards come with an extra pack of plaster powder to fill any remaining gaps after gluing the boards next to each other. I used both the plaster and fine sand to fill the gaps. I also placed some sand on various spots on the overall surface for a more realistic and less clean look. The last thing was to model the corners of the stonework and a step on each of the two stairs with modelling putty.

My focus during the entire process, or let's call it the "big goal", was to create one big piece that looks and feels like one coherent piece of terrain. I really don't like how terrain built with HirstArts products always looks like assembled Lego bricks. So it was important to me that the various walls, stairs, jetty and cobblestone boards all contributed to the appearance of one sensible piece of terrain.

The dock section in its entirety before undercoating

Lessons learned

It is important to put some heavy books on the sheets of styrofoam every time you apply the white glue. There was one moment - after I had already glued a few layers of styrofoam - where the entire thing started to bend heavily. I immediately placed my standard pile of books on it. At that point I had thought that the piece was sufficiently stabilized since there were already various layers, but, no, it bent. Luckily I noticed this in time and when the white glue was fully dried the docks were straight again. Still, don't trust these materials! All in all it took extremely long with daily cutting and gluing and nightly drying.

I also learned that it is impossible to build an accurate "block" by gluing sheets of styrofoam on top of each other. After a few layers you're always off by a few millimeters and I don't get better. For the second dock section - which will be a lot bigger too - I will use not only an MDF board as a base but also use one to maintain the correct measures for the upper layers. This is mainly important for the moulding sheets I like to glue to the sides.


So after all these days of slow building and waiting I'm finally done and ready to paint this sucker, now guess what - I ran out of undercoat spray and so did my local hobby store. His order of new spray paint is already over a week overdue. :/


Coming next in part 3: Dock Section I - Painted

Town House from Stronghold Terrain

The Town House is the second Stronghold Terrain building after the Guild House out of the lot I bought at the Tactica convention earlier this year.

What you get (the kit)

Let's start with a photo of the contents of the kit:

The contents of the box

The set consists of resin parts - two roof pieces, a window, two chimney pieces and a base - and plaster walls for the house itself. The plaster is good enough with few air bubbles. The walls of the ground floor fit together nicely; I used a bit of modelling putty to fill a few gaps (after painting the walls first, though!).

Note the modelled shingles and
matchstick panel

The window and chimney which are both glued on the roof looked a bit too "stacked on" for my taste, so I used modelling putty (ProCreate, to be precise) to fill the gaps between them and the roof. You can see the same on the sample photos of the Stronghold Terrain website. This was easy enough for the chimney but for the window I modelled extra shingles and hid the gap with matchsticks - an extra twenty minutes well spent I believe.

Painting & Extras

I wasn't quite happy with how the stonework of the Guild House turned out so I had to try something different this time. Using a tutorial by Elmar Fischer at elladan I used pigments this time: A mix of MIG Concrete, MIG Dry Mud and water applied on the black undercoat. After drying the pigments' colour was removed from the raised surfaces of the stones with a wet tissue. Then I applied the usual mix of drybrushing various greys and browns and watered down greys, browns and green. I am very satisfied with the result as I like the realistic look.

For the rust on the doors and windows I also used pigments by MIG Productions, following the Rust and Soot/Dust tutorial at Senji Studios*. Basically it's just three layers of first Vietnam Earth, followed by Standard Rust and finally some Light Rust. However, since I misplaced my MIG Pigment Fixer which I had bought years ago I had to mix the pigments with water and apply that.

This is also the first time I used Revell's Color Stop medium to achieve the effect of paint that is peeling off of the door. I will have to do some more experiments with it but for now I think it turned out okay. It's definately something that you need to get used to working with as it's a thick rubbery compound that is applied on top of the painted area. Then you paint everything with another colour (green in this case) and afterwards you can peel the compound off to show the underlying layer (brown/greyish wood in this case).

One of the things I like most about the house is the main entrance. With the arch and what looks like a window counter this house has a lot of character. I decided to emphasis on the shop appearance and make it a proper old shoppe. Finally I could put one of the etched brass signs to use that I bought as Dolls House supplies. I put the sign on an over-sized matchstick and glued it to a resin bag which I got for free from the nice guys of Strongold Terrain when I purchased the building at the Tactica. Thus I have a signpost that can stand on its own with no need to glue it on the base.

The signpost made of a matchstick and an etched brass sign

The fish crate is from Ainsty Castings (the exact product is 'Trade Goods D Boxed Products'). I wanted to make this 'Ye Olde Fishe Shoppe', home of Hazel, the Fishwife.

Photos

Now for some photos of the finished piece:

Update: Three more pictures in better quality:

Resumé

The Town House is a very nice small building which should be a great addition to any medieval city board. Granted, it won't be the centrepiece of your gaming table, but it will definately be a great addition that fits in well with your other high quality buildings. The only disadvantage is the lack of interior detail (for the windows most notably). While it does have a first floor to place your skirmishers on you may want to get a trapdoor and ladder to make it fully useable on the inside.
All in all it gets a high recommendation from me.


*[April14/2013: It seems that the Senji Studios website has fallen victim to some malware virus attack. Norton and Google report the site as dangerous. Therefore the links to Senji Studios have been removed to prevent the reader]

Citizens of Gierburg: Vendors

There is a number of different types of merchants operating in Gierburg. Vendors wander the narrow ways of the south, pushing a small cart or with a tray around their neck full of wares, usually some sort of light snack or beverage to aid a thirsty traveller.

Hey guys!

It's Tom reporting on Cianty's blog again. The painting is going well and there are plenty of new Gierburg citizens that I want you to "meet". Today I'm showing you two characterful figures from Alionas Miniatures that I painted for the Gierburg Project: the Fishwife and the Appleseller.

First is Hazel, the Fishwife. This is one of my first models entirely with Vallejo paints (save for the wash on the apron for which I used GW Devlan Mud.

I find fish can be a little tricky to paint, since it is hard to get the colour right. Everybody has a mental picture of a typical fish, but when you ask what actual "color" it is, it is tricky to define. I would say, most commercial fish are black-ish or silver-ish. However this would not necessarily look very recognisable on a miniature. So I decided to go for green, with the following recipie:

1. Basecoat VMC US Dark Green
2. Add VGC Camouflage Green increasingly and overbrush (stay mainly on the dorsal side of the animal)
3. Repeat with the same mix, but add a drop of VMC Dark Sand (Arena Oscura) and only overbrush the dorsal side.
4. Give the whole fish a wash of watered down VMC US Dark Green

The other vendor is Johan, the Appleseller. This is a model where you need to do some careful highlighting, shading and possibly some blending. The shirt is rather intricate (although it doesn't look like it) because its folds are deep enough to require shading but shallow enough to look unnatural if overdone. It took quite a while to get the mixes of VMC Tierra Mate and VMC Arena Oscura right, and I had to work my way back and forth between the different hues on the model to zero in on what I found to look best.

Enjoy the pics!

See you soon with another post!
Tom

WIP sneak peek of more Gierburg citizens coming soon