Termite Art, Branded Materials, and DIY in the hobby

Every so often, my blogging worlds (all this nonsense and Doctor Who fandom, in case you're keeping score) collide.  It's been a while since the last one, in which I was chattering about the Doctor Who roleplaying game, and so this has probably been a bit overdue.

Who pundit Lawrence Miles has (unless he's deleted it, as is his wont from time to time) been pontificating of late about brands, making things, and TV spinoffs.  Specifically, the rather cool Deadly Art.

But Deadly 60 has its own pilot-fish programme, Deadly Art. This is the latest and most carnivorous offshoot of the Take Hart format (or Art Attack, if you're dead common), and you can probably see how it all fits together. We get a precis of the accompaying Deadly 60, and then two artists in the studio - usually young women, y'know, like with Tony Hart - make A GIGANTIC SODDING PRAYING MANTIS WITH GLOWING EYES OUT OF SCRAP METAL. Only pausing to run off a smaller version out of the sort of thing you might find, ooh, in your bins.

I mention this less to rattle on about children's TV and more to pad the entry while explaining the term 'Termite Art'.  Y'see, Miles goes on to make an Interesting Remark:

If the Termite Art version of television provokes the viewer into going outside and poking around to see what's there (and I still hold that this is what most good telly does, especially children's telly), then this is more like siege conditions. Branding always closes the gates. This is your product, you don't need anything else.

Now, you can probably sense where I'm going with this.  Back when I was a lad, there was a lot of the miniature wargaming hobby that one was largely encouraged to Do For Oneself.  Sure, Citadel made trees (they weren't very good) and produced their own paintbrushes and paints and clippers and stuff, but there was never a particular drive for everything to be Official.  White Dwarf ran frequent articles on how to make modular chipboard battlefields, with terrain crafted from of bits of toilet and the ridiculous amount of white packing material that their larger kits came in, and they showed this stuff in battle reports; it was part of the Right Way to do the Hobby, and it was mostly pretty damn cheap.  Names were dropped in painting articles - Humbrol, Tamiya, Airfix - and there was a culture of crossover and usage between manufacturers.  Furthermore, it meant there were relations, however tenuous, between my hobby and the sort of shops my grandfather loved to visit.  The hobby sent me off into the big wide world looking for stuff to do things with (or things to do stuff with, if that's what you prefer).

Nowadays, of course, there's a Citadel-branded everything, and a definition of the Games Workshop Hobby that actively avoids mention of any other kind of Hobby.  The terrain you see in White Dwarf these days is exclusively the stuff you can buy in kit form in your local GW.  Mention of other manufacturers' paints and tools and miniatures and goodness knows what else is strictly off-limits.  I'm going to be fair here and point out that Privateer Press tried to go this way as well - Formula P3 paints, their own brushes and tools and even brass wire for pinning, not to mention the ill-fated Warmachine terrain kits - that Battlefront makes its own proprietary terrain kits as well, and that every bloody gaming company ever does it with dice, templates, tape measures and other accessories to play.

This saddens me, and it does so beyond the staggering expense of the stuff (this blasted thing is a particular offender).  I like to keep the gates open and to have a steady flow of people outwards as well as in.  I like initiative, and re-use, and re-cycling.  I like putting things to strange new purposes.  I don't like having the Official Product and being told that I don't need anything else.  Especially not when it's four times the effective price of what I've come up with.

Frugal Terrain for a Frugal Game – Necromunda Experiments

Excuse me for a minute while I ramble on a bit, to introduce a new project...

My second frugal year is going extremely well so far, as I’ve managed to squeeze in a few games of Necromunda recently. Part of that is helped by (finally) being able to drive across the country to visit family, and be able to catch up with old gaming friends. Technically, the petrol is expensive (oh boy, is it expensive) but it’s a cost I’d be shouldering anyway. As a bonus, I could play against my wife while our first gamer-in-training was being watched by his aunt. For my goals so far this year – I am a couple of hours behind on my painting, but that should be sorted later this week thanks to the Royal Wedding. The gaming budget has been used up till June, because I am a complete sucker for a Dawn of War game, and used up five months on it near the beginning of the year.

All this Necromunda has re-inspired me to work on some scenery for the game. It might just be what I’m used to (my original opponent had two box sets, two Outlanders sets, and the Imperial Bastion, Bunker and Firebase card scenery), but it just doesn’t feel right playing on a flat table with a single level of scenery. I much prefer thinking in three dimensions, trying to get up and down very specific points (the house rules are quite unforgiving about ladders and their usage) to get good covering positions. With only a Gorkamorka fort and ‘blocking’ terrain (hills, rocks, crashed spaceships), it’s not quite the same at all.

This is one thing that makes Necromunda – a free-rules game with a limited model requirement – less than frugal, for my preference. Don’t take this as a frugal game review, however – the game is far and away (if you consider Gorkamorka to be ‘merely’ an awesome variant, as I do) the best and most frugal wargame I’ve found. The problem is that the game improves amazingly with more scenery, to the point that reducing that scenery rankles slightly.

We’ve made do in a pinch with Lego terrain – multiple levels, ramps, and infinitely configurable, but the nightmare industrial Underhive will always look exactly like Toy Town. This never really bothers me any more than unpainted models or scenery bother me, but it’s still something I would rather correct.

Alongside the Lego, I’ve tried some of the Hexagon and Platformer sets – as many people have discovered, this is almost perfect for Necromunda. It’s even in a nice dark grey plastic that doesn’t necessarily need to be painted, so it can be disassembled for storage or reconfiguration. This, however, is hardly frugal at all. If I recall correctly (it’s been a while since I got them), the sets cost around £13 each and each make a single medium-to-large structure (as tall as the original card buildings but not as big a base area) with spare parts. To reproduce the original box sets cardboard scenery would cost at least £50 – incidentally, looking at the prices of the original terrain on eBay aren’t far off.

Next, I took the advice of every beginners terrain article through the years and got some expanded polystyrene – rather, I convinced the wife not to throw away the cupboard full of polystyrene that was delivered with our white goods. I cannot say for other modelling projects (they probably make good bases for hills, block buildings or other solid terrain) but this was a bad idea. We had perfect shapes in the polystyrene to create a ruined building with exposed elevator shaft, around six storeys tall. However, to make the polystyrene stable it couldn’t be cut thinner (it was almost two inches thick), so each floor of the building was nearly five inches high – an original Necromunda bulkhead was three inches high, and the cardboard floor is of negligible thickness. I compared the half-finished scenery to the original stuff, and placed it on the table to think about how we’d play it. It didn’t look good, since it obstructed so much line of sight both from within and without – effectively cutting the table in two. Even shortening the piece wouldn’t work, since it had all solid walls. That’s something very different to the cardboard scenery, which is quite open.

I’ve tried things that looked wrong, felt wrong, or cost too much. The kits were quick and beautiful, but small for their cost. The Lego was similarly quick and cheap (I’ve got buckets of Lego older than I am) – but would never look right. The expanded polystyrene was cheap (it’s rubbish), but would take a lot of time to produce something that didn’t work well enough.

Making all these comparisons to the original scenery has given me my next experiment. I’m no great designer, but I am great at criticising. Criticism, turned around, is constructive as a list of requirements. To make new scenery in the spirit of the old, it needs to have:

• Large-ish flat surfaces for plenty of movement
• Open walls
• Minimum of vertical usage
• Ability to attach walkways and connecting pieces
• Cheap

As I said, I’m not a great designer, so I have a scan of the original cardboard stuff and I’m going to copy it. I even believe I can improve on it for a small outlay of time and money – by building it out of plasticard, it will be more durable than the original scenery (good for someone like myself who throws all the scenery into a box and stuffs it in a corner). It will also let me model with it slightly better – I wisely lost a bottle roll early into a long multiplayer game on Saturday, and spent the rest of it examining the terrain for tips and ideas. There are some great touches added to the graphics, like exposed panels, thin pipes/hoses and vents, that could be modelled without making it too difficult to stand on.

The difficulty comes in that, as Von has discussed before we must watch the temporal investment of the hobby. I’ve saved a lot of time over the years by not painting models, but now I’m trying to correct that. It’s also a time when my time is more in demand – as a student, I thought/pretended I was busy, but as a full-time employee and father, I would slap that younger self for being such an utter nit. There is, however, a solution for this. As I come back to being in credit (see above, regarding Dawn of War) with my gaming budget, I can afford some of the more exotic plasticard I need (L-shaped angle lengths, thinner for decoration, etc) to make it look like a quality reconstruction and not just a thick cardboard knock-off. I technically come back into budget in the middle of June, but I might take an advance on that as I’ll be near a hobby shop before then getting supplies for ‘macro-modelling’ (aka DIY), and just accept that winter will be devoid of any new modelling goodies.

Writing this, I’ve also noticed that it’s something I can write about similar to the completely unrelated (except it also has the word Necromunda in it) ‘teach myself unit testing’ experiment at my own shameless plug blog (warning: I am a programmer in another life, this is not about gaming).

Next month, I’ll try and describe how I think I’ll solve the problems that reproducing the terrain in plasticard sheets will cause...

Living in a fantasy world

As regular readers of this blog know, I enjoy the trappings of power that being a famous blogger brings such as the money, the international travel and the constant requests for public appearances (I’m afraid I couldn’t make it to the Oscars this year as the organisers had already met their ‘British People’ quota).

The only drawback to my fame is that I now hate to give the oxygen of publicity to any other bloggers out there as I fear they may steal my precious followers (I love you all, please don’t leave me...).

However, I often see a blog that I feel needs a little bit more internet attention than it is currently receiving, in which case I’m happy to direct some of my fanbase over to it.  I was planning to recommend DJKs Fantasy blog, after it was brought to my attention a couple of weeks ago.  However, as DJKs blog is so good and I’m so lazy, within a few weeks (the first post on the blog was in February) the blog already has loads of followers.  So my idea of bestowing fame on one of the little people has failed. 

So, there’s no need for me to talk about the excellent work that DJK is doing on his blog, but I’m going to do it anyway.  As I say there have only been a handful of posts but each one is chock full of goodness.  Each is a detailed account of scratchbuilding wooden buildings suitable for fantasy, medieval or even old west gaming and he’s been using my favourite of materials, the wooden coffee stirrer.  DKJ gets his for free and they need washing so I’m not sure what he’s up to.  I hope he works in Starbucks.

DJK seems to have the polar opposite approach to me for terrain building, I like to draw detailed plans and measure everything as accurately as I can (I’m an engineer, it’s not my fault) whereas DJK seems to have a more rustic style, as he says himself:

I don't set out with detailed plans of what I intend to build, quite often I have an idea for the type of building I want or a feature I want to include and then see what happens.

I like his approach and it gives the pieces real character.  I hope I don’t sound like I’m damning with faint praise here; these models are fantastic and I felt inspired to try some of my own.  As a Frugal Gamer these buildings really appealed to me, they’re really cheap to make and look great when finished.

There are a lot of gaming blogs, that try to be funny (hello!), that show fantastically painted miniatures, or that teach you how to build gaming boards bigger than a swimming pool, but DJKs blog really appeals to me, it’s the kind of feature you’d expect to find in an old copy of White Dwarf.  It’s not only useful and very well presented, it also doesn’t try to hard to show off or be too clever.    In an age when everyone has to have a great new novel idea it’s heartwarming to see someone doing something simple and doing it so well.  I look forward to seeing what DJK comes up with next.

So in other words, I can highly recommend this site to you all, get over there now and check it out.

Happy gaming!

A Budget Battlefield

Evenin' all.

I recently acquired a digital camera, and intend to spend at least part of this weekend clearing the backlog of hobby posts I've been meaning to make since.. actually since I left Plymouth last year.  To start with, here's a series of reliable images of some terrain, which I'm having enormous fun building and which, through a combination of thrift, hoarding, careful selection of supplies, re-use of old project materials and above all getting someone else to spend money for me, I am not actually paying for.

This is what happens when two art-and-craft types move in together.

Allow me to explain.  Much of what you see on this board is being constructed not on my dime, for my own purposes, but for the greater good of Dice and Decks, proud hosts of (ahem)

and therefore being paid for by the club - that's the stuff that isn't made out of stuff I was hoarding anyway.

Joining a club is frankly great for this sort of thing; it's a way of doing something which I really enjoy (building terrain) without the usual opportunity cost (having to spend my miniatures/rules/entry-fee/bus fare on materials for it) - and there's a certain warm glowing feeling which comes from knowing that I'm making something which other people will play on and derive enjoyment from, even in my absence.

Taking a closer look at a few pieces now, we have the Troll-sized adobe huts -

Squint and you'll see the Trollblood I used to test the doors' scale.

- which are basically soup pots covered in modelling clay, which is pummelled into a suitable texture before a rim is added and carved into to create the appearance of crudely hewn stone blocks.  I bought the modelling clay from Hobbycraft, which was a mistake when there are places like the Gloucestershire Resource Centre in the world.  Incidentally, that's another great reason to join a club; a non-profit organisation running an all-in community activity is well positioned to take advantages of opportunities which simply aren't available to private individuals.

We also see the return of the Wire Trees, which I cover in a black-brown ink over the green-grey Milliput for a more sort of blighted, nasty, industrial-waste-tainted kind of look (seriously, brown trees always look like a children's drawing).  Witness these half-finished ones and marvel!

Hark textured one in the time it took me to do five.  She's a Proper Artist, you see...

I also have a collection of stirrers, which are going to be made into plank fences, and am under orders to produce some linear obstacles (that's 'lines of sandbags' to non-Warmachine types) out of more modelling clay when I can be bothered to pick some up.  Best get a move on - this is the last weekend before the tournament!

Building a Ruined Defensive Wall - Part 2

A couple of weeks ago I started explaining how to build a ruined wall terrain piece, in this post I’ll carry on with my method; sculpting and texturing the base, and painting the finished piece.  Details of the tools and materials I used are included in the first half of this post.

Sculpting the base and finishing the walls
To landscape the areas between the walls and the base, I use expanded polystyrene, sourced from old packing material.  I cut the polystyrene roughly to shape using a hot wire cutter, this was then glued in place using wood glue (PVA works just as well) and plaster was used to fill any gaps.

The next step is to finish off the walls.  As I used blocks to create my wall, there were small gaps between some of the blocks which show up when the model is painted and can ruin the overall effect.  To fill these gaps I mixed some plaster with a lot of water to get a really runny consistency and paint this liberally all over the model.  It runs into the gaps, filling them nicely; a little bit of detail is lost, but overall the look of the wall is significantly improved.

When all the plaster has dried, it’s time to texture the base.  This is really easy (and pretty fun); mix up some plaster along with PVA glue, sand and fine gravel then paint it all over the base up to where the ground meets the walls.  I also painted a bit of this mix onto the floors to represent rubble and dirt from the collapsed walls.

Painting
I primed using grey spray primer, the main reason I use this is that it can be picked up for £1 a can, though it also gives good coverage and I prefer painting over grey than a black primer.

For the main painting, I went for cheap emulsion paints (remember this is a Frugal Gaming blog!) for the base and walls, with cheap acrylic used for drybrushing and painting the floors.  I gave the finished model a quick dusting of light brown with my airbrush to age it a little and bring all the colours together before adding the vegetation.

As this was a big build, I used a couple of different types of flock in patches and even added some long grass in various locations to break up the long walls.  This really added to the final look of the model and was well worth the couple of pounds I spent on different grasses (hey, I saved money on the paints, okay?).

To finish off the model I gave it a good couple of coats of satin varnish to protect the paintwork, seal the flock in place and ‘flatten’ the colours.  Giving a terrain piece like this a coat of dull varnish also stops any cheap paints that were used from shining.


Results
I'm very happy with the finished model; it looks good, it can be played on, it’s hardwearing and most importantly it didn’t cost much to build.

As this is a simple model, you can add as much extra detail as you like depending on your own personal taste, I decided to leave it relatively plain to allow it to be used for fantasy or sci-fi games, plus theres fewer pieces to get knocked off when moving it about!

Once again, thanks to Doctor Merkury for the inspiration and letting me steal his idea.

Building a Ruined Defensive Wall - Part 1

A couple a months ago I saw an incredible terrain piece by Doctor Merkury on his pulp gaming blog; Doctor Merkury’s Lab, a gaming blog I can highly recommend to anyone with an interest in well made terrain, excellent writing or giant robots, so that’s pretty much all of us then... 

The piece in question was a ruined wall section (imagine a heavily damaged and neglected section of the great wall of China) that was in three parts, I was instantly inspired to created my own piece as a gift for my son.  (Remember my previous thoughts on making Frugal presents?)
 
I’m quite happy with how the final piece turned out so I thought I’d show you all my method for construction, there’s a lot of information, hopefully useful, so I’ll split this post into two parts and put the second up in a week or so.  Anyway, let’s begin...

Materials
The materials I used to make the wall are as follows:

• 5mm Plywood (you can use any thin wood, but I opted for thicker plywood as I wanted it to be hardwearing, see below)
• Crystacast casting powder (any casting plaster or Plaster of Paris will do, but Crystacast is very hardwearing)
• Polystyrene Foam (any old insulating foam or packaging will do)
• Sand and Gravel of various sizes
• Lots of paints (cheap acrylics or emulsions are fine)
• Matt/satin spray varnish
• Flock/Static grass
• PVA or Wood Glue
• Strong Epoxy glue (you can get good quality two-part epoxies cheaply from £1 shops)

Variations
I made my wall using plaster blocks cast from a mould, but you can also get excellent results cutting the walls from dense foam, then covering them with a fine sand and glue mix.

Tools

• Scroll Saw
• Sandpaper
• Hirst Arts Fieldstone block mould - see my review of Hirts Arts moulds here
• Hot wire cutter for polystyrene
• Sharp knife
• Strong pliers for breaking blocks
• Fine saw for cutting balsa wood
• Paintbrushes

Don’t worry if you don’t have a scroll saw or hot wire cutter, hand tools such as saws and sharp knives will also provide good results.

As always, be careful using any tools, paints or glues.  I don’t want to hear about any horrific injuries and I don’t want to lose any followers!

Getting Started
I always start a project like this with a few sketches, it helps to fix the idea in my head and give me something to work from.  I’ve made a few projects without a sketch, but I invariably get halfway through the project and forget some of the bits I was going to do!

At this point it worth thinking about how your terrain piece will be used.  Will it be a piece that is only used infrequently or only put on display, or will it be used all the time and knocked about by carrying it from game to game?  My own terrain piece was to be a present for my 12 year old son and as such it had to be remarkably hard wearing.  This meant a thick plywood base, solid wall construction and minimal details (so no flagpoles, delicate wooden doors, fences etc), all these decisions will influence your decisions on specific materials to use, though the overall types of material and method of construction will be the same.

An important aspect of making a terrain piece like this is the overall size.  You’ll need to consider how big your gaming table is and how much storage space you have available.  After making my initial sketches I cut out a couple of possible base shapes and sizes out of card to make sure the overall ‘footprint’ of the piece would be right.  I made the base in three parts; a centre fortress section and two walls.  This would allow ease of storage and mean that the pieces could be used individually or all together.  When I was happy with my shapes, I drew around them onto my plywood and started cutting.

Earlier this year I had wisely invested some of my money in a scroll saw, this is a very fast moving saw that can cut twisting and curing shapes through a variety of materials.  This was perfect for cutting the curving shapes of my base and it went through my plywood with ease.  When the pieces had been cut I checked that they fitted together correctly and sanded down any rough edges.

 
Making the Walls
When the base pieces had been cut, I went back to my sketches to check where my walls would be on the base and then drew the outline of where I wanted them to go.  The next stage was the most time consuming, casting all the plaster blocks that I needed, fortunately, most of the time is taken up by waiting for the plaster to set, so I could get on with other things.
To make the walls, I laid blocks out over the top of the marks I had drawn on the bases to make sure the size and shape were correct and then glued them together with PVA or wood glue.  DO NOT glue them to the base at this stage, just to each other.  I made my wall sections upside down, I started with the layer of blocks that would form the walkway on top of the wall and then added rows, finishing with the row that would be glued to the base, the reason for doing this is that it allows you to miss out blocks on the bottom row so that the wall will be at an angle when it is attached to the base, enhancing the ruined look.

When these blocks had set, I attached them to the base using two-part epoxy, sanding the bottom of the wall down first to ensure that it would fit smoothly to the plywood and provide a good area for the glue.

I left this overnight to ensure the epoxy had fully set and then used some more blocks to add crenelations (the wavy bits bits that archers hide behind) to the top of the wall.  At this point, I would recommend having one of your gaming figures to hand to make sure that can see over your walls on the walkway, you don’t want to spend all this time creating a defensive position that the defenders can’t see out from!

When all the extra blocks and crenelations have been added your wall should look as good as new, so it’s time to do a bit of battle damage.  I took a pair of old cutters I had around the house and used them to break chunks out of the plaster, focusing the worst (or best) of the damage on the ends of the walls.  This is great fun and will give you a good effect, don’t be shy with the damage either, the badder the better.

Making the Floors
At this point you can make the floors for the top of the walkway of the wall.  I often use planks to cover floors on terrain pieces, but time I wanted to try something a little easier and more fitting the subject.  I read a post on The Miniatures Page about using textured wallpaper to represent floor tiles so I thought I’d give it a go.  Rather than rushing out and buying a whole roll, I found a website selling embossed wallpaper who offer free sample sheets (A4 size) to potential customers, I ordered a couple of styles that I thought may be suitable and got them through the post a couple of days later.  If you have a local DIY or home improvement shop, they’ll probably be happy to give you some samples, you could be really cheeky and take in a miniature with you to make sure that the scale is correct!

Rather than sticking this straight onto the top of the wall, I glued it onto some thin balsa wood cut to size to provide a bit more strength and prevent any of the stone effect on the top of the blocks used for the wall showing through.  I then gave this a bit of a trim and glued it onto the top of the wall using two part epoxy to form a strong bond.

I think that's enough for you all to be getting on with for the time being, I’ll continue my build next time, happy gaming!

EDIT: Part 2 can be found here.

What I Did On My Holidays

It's been two weeks and, as planned, the basics of the board are there and laid out.

I did end up spending about £24 on this, but I got significantly more for my money than I would have done if I'd been a fool and bought that GW kit. I ended up shelling out for a litre tin of mid-brown emulsion paint that's a close match for Vallejo Earth, 500 ml of sand base from an art shop and 300 ml of matte medium to make it go further (and I still have some left for making hills and suchlike, too). Flock was free, courtesy of our glorious host, and I still have half the tub left there as well.

I'm still sulking, though - partly because I didn't need QUITE that much paint (I was startled while calculating how much I'd need and misplaced the decimal point - at least I have enough for every terrain making project I'm likely to do, ever, and then some) and partly because while I was buying the paint I found an even more Frugal option that would have saved me a fair bit of time and money.

Homebase, bless them, sell a mid-brown textured spray paint at about £7.50 for a 400ml can. Having already bought and applied the sand base and matte medium, I didn't get the chance to play about with it, but I suspect two cans ought to be more than enough for a 4'x4' board... so if you want to texture and paint a board in one easy step and spend £10 less than I did, that might be the way to go. I think my Frugal Year might be turning into a "do as I say, not as I do" enterprise...

Trees! Made by our gracious host Dave's method, entirely out of stuff I found in the cupboard, where it had lingered for several years, unused and unremembered - thick card, florists' wire, Milliput, Windsor and Newton brown/black inks and the last of the matte medium (and some water). The only thing I bought new for these was the lichen - two bags of Landscape Scenics stuff, of which I still have about two-thirds of a bag left. Not sure what I'm going to do with that - maybe moss on the buildings when I get around to doing those, or a 10mm forest for Hordes of the Things.

River! I gave the entire board a wash of that W&N ink + matte medium + water mix to bring the texture back out after I'd emulsioned it, and the river is just PVA (we have a lot of PVA glue) layered over that. I'm not a hundred per cent happy with it, but not sure what to do about it either. I'm not going to just paint it blue (for the same reason that my treetrunks aren't plain brown), I know that much.

Game! Yes, I haven't forgotten about that essential 'spend less, game more' mission, even if I do spend half my time waffling about ephemera like 'emotional investment' - there is a point to all this scrimping and saving and building and painting, after all. Shiny's Warmachine army has finally arrived in strength and we played a couple of games yesterday afternoon to celebrate. I shan't bend anyone's ear about them here, but keep your eyes on my personal blog if you're interested.

It's time to get started...

Hi everyone, and welcome to a new Year of Frugal Gaming, I hope you're enjoying the posts from Pete and Von, I'm really pleased to have them on board and I'm interested to see how their Frugal Years unfold. If you fancy spending less and gaming more, then take up your own Year of Frugal Gaming. All you need to do is commit to watching your spending on gaming items by concentrating on good quality essentials that you know will get used, combine this with a dedication to playing more games and you're on your way. Hey, you only need to keep it up for 12 months, how hard can it be? If you're really keen, post a comment on the site or send me an email (to thefrugalgamer(at)gmail.com), I'm always looking for more contributors so drop me a line and I can give you posting rights on the blog if you fancy!

Anyway, back to reality, I'm afraid that my own year is not off to the best of starts. On the plus side, I haven't spent any money on gaming products so far, though this has to be balanced against the fact that I've not actually done any gaming this year, yikes! I think I need to get off my bum and arrange some gaming evenings, this might inspire me to get the paints out as well and get a bit of gaming momentum.

Speaking of which; this week I went to visit Von and drop him off some flock for his game board (see previous post) and picked up a boar chariot from him to go with my (yet to be started) Goblin army project. I'm got plenty of night goblins, a giant and various other units, I've even got the Army book, but I've still to get it all sorted out. Let's not even mention my Dark Eldar force for 4ok, though I did manage to pick up lovely metal tool box to keep it in (a mere £2!), my plan is to add magnets to the bases of the figs so that I can carry them around without them falling all over the place (or paying a fortune for a GW case).
As a gaming related aside, I've even started looking forward to this Christmas. One of my intentions this year is to make all the Christmas presents I'm giving, the first one I want to get started on is a piece of gaming scenery for my son (don't worry, he doesn't read this blog!) I've seen an awesome bit of terrain I intend to take inspiration from over at Doctor Merkury's Lab, a fantastic site which is well worth checking out. I hope he doesn't mind me stealing his photo!
And finally... I've now added a search box to the blog so you don't have to trawl through all the articles to find what you want. I've also added Facebook and Twitter functions so that you can post the latest blog entry to your Facebook page. Try it out, spread the word and let me know how you get on!

Happy Gaming

Von's Frugal Year: Month The First

So, it's been a month: how's that Frugal thing goin'?

Financially: I've been very very good, staying under my £50 limit with a £45 trip to Clifton Road Games in Exeter to pick up some Warmachine minis. The financial side of the mission is going to have to tighten up a little bit, though (told you I'm not really rich): the WoW fees are going to start coming out of that fifty quid, and it really has to be seen as an upper limit, not a target.

Emotionally: I made it through the Hordes field test and didn't shout at anyone or get upset about any of it (certainly there are things that disappoint me, but I'm maintaining a state of cheerful indifference - it's still basically a decent game). I am having a bit of Gamer Angst now that the redraft of the rules has come out; I definitely want to do a Hordes force at some stage (next year, in all likelihood, once the new core rules are set in stone and actually out), but I'm not sure which. Got it down to two, and have a year to think about it.

Temporally: Okay, the last week's sort of broken this one a bit. I've had three days off work plus the weekend following a wee operation on my foot, and since I couldn't move about much at first I did spend a lot of time (about, ooh, four hours a day) playing WoW and quite a lot of time (again, about four hours a day) painting miniatures. It's not really being Frugal with my time, although I hope it's defensible (especially since I didn't really have a Christmas holiday this year and badly needed a few days R&R).


Looking forward, then: I've been shockingly lax on the whole finishing-the-battlefield-thing, so I think that's going to be next month's big hobby project. Much of the Nerd Money for the month will be going on one of those Scenery Painting Packs that Games Workshop makes; sure, it's £25, but it's a one-stop shop (better for time) and I won't have to buy tons more stuff than I need (which might end up happening if I pop down the hill to the builder's merchants and buy my paint from there). If I can shop around one afternoon and find all the stuff in that pack, in the quantities I need it, for less than £25, I'll skip it, but it looks like a reasonable investment in the here and now.

EDITED TO ADD: this is appallingly poor reasoning on my part. Anything purchased from a gaming company's hobby products line will come with a massive markup and it's a rare product indeed that's actually worth that (Citadel inks, and... umm... actually, that's about all I can think of). I should know better, in fact I usually do know better; it's been years since I bought so much as a GW brush. What I wrote this morning is a shame and embarrassment to the Frugal Mission. It is staying there so that I, and you, can learn from my mistakes.

In the interests of staying under budget, I'll try and stay off the new miniatures for the month - actual gaming time will probably be spent actually playing Dark Heresy, since I bought it last year and have yet to do much more than drool over it and have Shiny roll up his character. Maybe I'll write something about Frugal Roleplaying down the line (it's not as easy as it looks, you know), or maybe not. I already have a list of stuff I could bend your ears about, after all.

Further adventures in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future will naturally be chronicled over here, and with a bit of luck I'll be back in a couple of weeks with some sort of terrain progress. Bet you can't wait. Von out.

Making Wire Trees

Hello all! It's been a busy couple of weeks so the blog has had to take a break (It has been gaming related though, so expect a treat next week!). I managed to get both a game of Necromunda and Warhammer Fantasy played yesterday against Matt. I won Necro and Matt won WFB so all was good, however, it was Matt's first game of WFB so it probably counts double!

This week I thought I'd show you all how I make trees. This is a very common method and you can find lots of variations of it on the internet, but here's how I do it:

Materials Required
150cm of Thin Wire (I use florist's wire, but any wire slightly less than 1mm thin will do)
Two part modeling putty (I use Milliput, you can use greenstuff, but you use a lot so it can work out a bit expensive)
Sand or Gravel
Flock or other vegetation for detailing
Thin Plywood (2mm) or plasticard

Tools
Glue gun (or strong thick glue; superglue and PVA are not suitable).
Wire Cutters
Sharp knife/Saw
Sculpting tool

Method

Step 1 Cut and Bend wire
Cut the wire into six or seven equal length strips. Bend each length in half and twist it around itself, leaving a loop at the bottom and two small, separate branches at the top.

Step 2 Form the Trunk
Taking your twisted wires, twist them around each other to form a trunk for the tree with the branches coming out of the top. Make sure that the loops at the end of each twisted wire are at the bottom of the tree as these will be stuck to the base and covered when finished. Bend the branches out at the top of the tree to make the desired shape.

Step 3 Attach to the base
Cut out a small base from the plywood or plasticard and attach your tree using hot glue or epoxy resin. You need a strong, thick glue at this stage, so superglue or PVA is not suitable.

Step 4 Texture the Tree
Add Milliput or plaster over the whole of the tree and base. Smear it on, then create some rough lines with the edge of a knife or sculpting tool down the trunk to represent the bark. At this stage you can also roughly texture the base as well.

[EDIT: Jimborex from The Miniatures Page suggested using Caulking or Mastic to cover the wire. This is more flexible than Milliput so will not break off as easily if damaged. It may not take the detail as well, but hey, all engineering's a compromise]



Step 5 Basing
When the putty or plaster has fully dried, add gravel or any basing materials you wish and leave to dry.

Step 6 Painting
Spray with the primer of your choice then paint brown (or grey for a desolate look). All that's then needed is a light drybrush to bring out the texture.

Step 7 Finishing touches
If you wish you can add leaves to the tree (many specialist flocks are available) or just leave bare. Flock the base as desired.

So there you go, one easy to make tree. This is a very simple design and has much room for improvement or experimentation. You can make these as large or small as you like, in small batches or large forests. Have a play, experiment and let me know how you get on. As always, photos are welcomed and I'll even post them on the site if you fancy! Happy Gaming.

Putting those skills to good use...

All this modeling, gaming, painting and saving money may be fun for a Frugal Gamer, but there are other uses for the skills that you may have picked up over the years. A couple of weeks ago I looked at some ideas for gaming related gifts for friends. This week I've been using my gaming and modelling acquired skills for non-gaming purposes.

This has all come about as I decided to use the plaster casting skills I picked up from making terrain to make Christmas decorations for my friends and family. I decided to make some 'alternative' Christmas decorations (nonreligious, funny, or just plain weird) and set to work making sketches. I used exactly the same method as for making wargaming terrain (i.e. make a master, cast a mould and then cast some plaster pieces) these then have hooks added, they're painted and then varnished. I'm quite happy with the results and I've got plenty of ideas for more. Here's what I've done so far, a man-eating snowman and the grave of Santa:
You can find my Etsy shop here, and an occasional blog dedicated to the making of the decorations here.

Happy Gaming (and crafting)!

Necromunda / 40K Terrain

It's been another quiet week for gaming, plus I've got an exam looming which I'm revising for so the painting has taken a bit of a back seat. Fortunately, this gives me the chance to show you a model I finished a few weeks ago.

I was given an old cardboard tub from a friend (you know you're a serious gamer when your friends save bits and pieces for you!) and decided that it would make an excellent pair of storage tanks. I also had an old broken desk lamp that I needed to use in a project so I decided to put it all together...

I added a few plastic pipes to add to the industrial theme, and some of my plaster mouldings to provide cover.

The tops of the tanks were plastic mesh (used for cross-stitch and available from craft shops). I made the ladders using a technique from a previous post, and the other pieces are all from my bits box.

The base was textured using amis of sand, PVA glue, black paint and plaster. This was then painted onto the base with a thick brush. Various bits of broken plaster, stones and pipes were pressed into the mix while still wet.

The whole thing was then spraypainted black...
Then it was painted with an airbrush...

Final bits of detail and flock were added and It's ready to go! Hooray!

This was quite a quick project, but it was fun to make and I really like the final results. Just because a terrain project is large, it doesn't have to be remarkably complex. Give it a go and let me know how you get on!


Happy Gaming!

A Day of Frugal Trading

Hello all, and if this is the first time you've visited my blog, Welcome.

I always appreciate new readers and I've hopefully gained a few more after handing out dozens of flyers this weekend. The reason for all this, as you probably know, is my visit to the Lincombe Barn Wargamers Table Top Sale yesterday. One of the aspects of my Year of Frugal Gaming was to see if I could raise money with my hobby. Not huge amounts, but enough so that my gaming, painting and modeling came close to paying for itself and my trip to Lincombe Barn was my first try at running a small stall to sell gaming items. I'd decided to try and sell some of my hand made terrain, as it's something that I've always enjoyed doing and I think that it's an area of the hobby that I'm reasonably good at. The past few weeks have been spent cutting, gluing and painting to get plenty of pieces ready, and yesterday my girlfriend and I loaded up the car and set off to Bristol.
To cut a long story short, I didn't sell as much as I'd hoped, but I had a great day. I made enough to cover my travel and entrance costs and had enough left over for a couple of cups of coffee!

Everyone I spoke to seemed really friendly and a few had even been following the blog, which was great, I spoke to a few other traders, including a house husband who makes trees whilst the kids are asleep! I think he was doing about as much trade as I was, but he seemed remarkably philosophical about the whole business. If you're out there Mystery Tree Man, drop me a line and I'll 'big-up' your products. I also spoke to Mike from the Plymouth Association of Wargamers (those guys get everywhere..) who was also selling some pieces of terrain and some minis. He was really promoting the club, so I really can't excuse not getting along there in the next couple of weeks...

So, as mentioned above, at the end of the day I had a few more pieces left than I'd thought, which means that I'll be selling them off on ebay (with some remarkably cheap postage), so I've added a link to the auctions on the right hand side of the page (over there somewhere --->). The items up for sale will be changing over the next few days, so keep checking back.

This made a bit of a mess of the sidebar so I've had a of a tidy up, adding an FAQ which gives my contact details and the information on the ongoing 'Frugal Challenge' to game and figure manufacturers. Click the link and have a look.

Remember that as well as any comments you may have on the content of the site, I'm always happy to receive comment on the layout and style of the blog as well. Though if you want me to change my background to the generic brown wargamer map style, often used in blogs, then I'm sorry, but I'm sticking with my neons!

See you next week, happy gaming!

Saturday - Finished Terrain... Hooray!

Well at long last, the train making is finished. Here are all the pieces finished and ready to go. If you want to pick one or more of these pieces up, come along to the Lincombe Barn Wargamers Tabletop Sale in Bristol on Sunday!

The prices are:

• Tanks Traps: £5
• Rocky Terrain:£4
• Buildings:£10
• Defensive Walls:£5
• Defensive Emplacements:£6

Click on the photos for larger scale photos, all the best

Dave