Hardcore Foamcore: Ruins II

Continuing the series on *reasonably* realistic terrain made mostly out of foam core. Here is a picture of that first test building with the parts all assembled. 

The building went together pretty easily with some white glue and paper clip pins for strength. I am pretty happy with how the stone work is looking. I't not perfect, of coarse; you can see the line where the two foam layers come together, making the wall look as though it were made of two rows of stones. However, I feel that this minor flaw is balanced by how easy the stonework effect is to achieve. I'm also hoping that the painting stage will help to sell it.

As you  can see, I also textured the CD base with some sand:

You can see the foundation for a second section lurking in the background, alongside the omnipresent cairns.

I half built another section before realizing I should probably cut out all the components so I could build everything at once:

Two assembled ruins and 'various bits and pieces,' as Niel Shuck would say...

I traced the building parts onto the foam core sheet using a template I drew on graphing paper. I actually designed four unique corners...the templates just made it easier to draw the pieces to scale. Also, if I ever decide that my hobby will include resin casting, it would be handy to have those templates around to make a 'Fantasy Ruins' garage kit.

As anyone who has worked with foam core will tell you, the toughest part is actually cutting the bits out of the sheet, what with having to cut through three layers. Having a design that was full of greebly nooks and corners didn't help, but I felt they were essential to the feeling of detail. Next time I might just try peeling the paper off of one side of the sheet before I cut out the bits. Then, in theory at least, I might be able to cut each component out in one go.

Finally, it was time to add some further detail. I splintered up some coffee stirrers to use as broken rafters and scattered some of the splinters on the flags. Then I took a walk. And discretely made off with some bits of my neighbor's gravel driveway. This was for larger rubble to represent masonry that had fallen from the wall more recently, but had not yet been carried away by scavenging masons, or otherwise disturbed.

Stay tuned next time for the final details, some creative texturing, and pics of the other three sections. And as always, please comment. I like questions. I like criticisms. I also like jokes.

Leave your jokes here:

Hardcore Foamcore: Ruins I

This post is the first in a short series on some terrain that I've been making using foamcore. Today, I'll show you the first part in my take on that wargaming terrain staple, the ruined building.

This whole idea began when I stumbled across this amazing modeling project.

I realized this was the perfect opportunity to push my own limits of 'realism' in terrain, as well as an opportunity to prove that another cheap, readily available material can be used in place of harder-to-find media like EPS, or 'blue foam.'

What follows was my first test building. The plan was to make three more like this and base them on CDs so that they could be placed as individual ruins or together as one building.

A door wall, a window wall, a section for flagstones, and some buttresses.

The main problems with a lot of foamcore buildings that I see are that the surface often ends up featureless, and the edges tend to show. This bothers me because it breaks the realism.

To fix this, I decided I would peel the paper off, as suggested in the above article, so that I could scribe textures into the foam itself. However, in experiments I found that the foam became dangerously thin and fragile when I peeled the paper off of both sides. I decided that the best way to deal with this was to cut two of each piece and then peel the paper off of the opposite sides.

The exception, of course, was the floor. Only needed one of those.

Peeling the paper was a bit of a pain, but with patience and the blade of an exacto, I eventually lifted off the majority. Once that was done, I glued the paper sides together.



My walls in progress hanging out with my cairns in progress.

Once the walls had dried, I began scribing the lines of the bricks with the back of my exacto blade. I took this opportunity to also cut a slot for the window sill, which I made by cutting a coffee stirrer to size.


You can see that I've blocked out the spot for the buttress to the left of the window. I would later push this section in with the butt of my pencil for a more realistic join.

I then went through my brick layers and scored the lines for the individual bricks. I did my best to make them match up along the edges. I then went back through with a pencil and gently widened each of the scored lines. Finally, I went over each piece with a chunk of porous stone, to add some textural variance.

Here is the result so far. Stay tuned to see the rest of the building come together.

Quick n' Easy Cairns I

Even though I have almost no figures for use in Skulldred, I persist in making terrain in preparation to play. Here's a quick tutorial on one of these little projects.

Here's a classic of the 'look, wargames terrain is easy to make' genre: piles of rocks. Or, as they are otherwise known, 'Cairns'.

To make these, you can buy a giant bag of decorative pine bark from a garden store. Or you can casually walk off with a stranger's neglected landscaping. Guess which one I did.

Next, give them a quick rinse and a gentle scrub under the faucet. Your goal here is to remove any dirt and any loose flakes of bark. Let them dry, then grab your PVA glue and your base. Here I'm using old CDs since I have a lot of them, their highly modular, and they don't warp unless you really try. Then you just stack them and glue them. I found that doing a preliminary 'dry stack' first helped me to come up with a good formation to use.

Here are a couple of pics with a Bloodbowl Orc Blitzer for scale. In the next installment of this series, I will paint and base these.

What are some simple but effective terrain builds that you use to trick out your table in a rush? Leave a comment and let me know. Or comment on something completely different. Your call.

A Moveable Beast: My Portable Sculpting Studio

Hi there everyone. This is just a quick post I put together in response to a few questions no one asked, regarding my sculpting tools and set-up. So I thought I'd give a quick overview.

Washers at about 10 cents each. Dental tools at around $5. Blistex for 99 cents. Paper clips for the same. Junky pens-- priceless.

The tools: 

1) (top left) A cork to use as a handle for the mini. I've glued washers to both the bottom and the side of this cork so that it can be used for either small or large figures.

2) (middle) Sculpting tools. You can see at the bottom a pair of cheap store-bought dental tools, which aren't very good for anything but rough work. The three tools above them are the gold. They are scratch-built tools, filed down from paperclips, polished with super-fine sandpaper, and mounted in disused ball-point pens using putty. If you want to put together a set of these, check out this tutorial. King uses drilled out pieces of color-coded dowel, which is way classier, but I didn't have any of that on hand, so crappy old pens it was.

3) Blistex. This is about the most portable form of petroleum based wax lubricant that you can find. And it smells nice, too (better than green stuff anyway.) Just make sure to use it sparingly or else rinse the model with soap between layers of GS, since it can really prevent new layers from sticking.

Food-container: free with some food. Sandwich baggie: free with a sandwich. Box: free with a $1000 gizmo.

The Set-up:

Here's where it all gets clever. I happened to have an Ipad box laying around (HAHAHAHAHAHA, yeah right. I snagged an extra from work) which was a great size for fitting in a book-bag, since its roughly text-book sized and shaped. It was also nice and sturdy and therefore unlikely to be crushed. 

I took a small food container (I think this one once held parmesan cheese) and glued it right into the box with a small lake of superglue. Once that cured, I put in my super-glue, my blistex, and all of my small- and jumbo-sized paperclips. 

I found a handy velcro strap for wrapping my tools and my six inch pocket ruler in. Rubberbands work too.

I found a small sandwich baggie. I placed my green stuff into the sandwich baggie.

I then cut a small square of cardboard, and laminated it with clear adhesive sheets. I can smear a little blistex on here to have a portable, flat, non-stick surface. However, I am beginning to have problems with air-bubbles under the laminate, and so will probably simply replace this with an old CD.

Finally, I laid all of this out in the box to see where I could put my figure so it wouldn't be disturbed during transportation. There was the perfect cavity on the bottom right. Once I had the spot, I pierced the side of the box with a paperclip which I then glued in place. This formed a short spike on the inside of the box onto which I could put the cork. The spike goes through the center of the washer and into the cork, preventing it from bouncing around. This way I can take my studio somewhere, sculpt for a while, and place the uncured model in the box without fear of my work being ruined. If you want, you can also glue magnets into the box to stick to the washer and make it even more secure.

There is also enough room to fit a pair of pliers and a pair of clippers for making armatures. And the box lid makes a passable portable photo back-drop.

As always, remember to post a comment if you have any questions or feedback. It would make my year.

Yeah, I'm back. WHAT OF IT?

So it seems to be a requirement for bloggers, whenever they are woefully absent from their blogs for any amount of time, to apologize and provide their excuse. Presumably if the excuse is valid, the readers will have mercy and keep following the blog.
...

Well SCREW THAT.

I may not be able to make that face, but sometimes that's how I feel like I should look, deep deep down.

I'm not apologizing. I didn't feel like posting. Life's been hard. I still don't have a job. And I've only got one follower anyway.

(On second thought, I do apologize to you, dear follower, YOU'RE AWESOME PLEASE KEEP FOLLOWING.)

What I WILL do is tell you what I have been up to during this long silence. So here's a list:

-I went to the Chaos Cup with a fully painted Orc team.
-I also finished sculpting and painting my Troll.
-And did some conversions for some players.
-I made myself a super-sweet dice tower.
-I made some beer with some friends.
-I scratch-built some terrain in anticipation of Skulldred.
-And some other stuff... job applications... whatever.

So that's what you can expect to be coming across this blog in the next few weeks (except the applications.) Stay tuned. Maybe follow me. I'm also going to try and diversify the blog content here a little bit, since this 'hobby blog' has been largely dominated by me fussing over the little dudes. And also because I don't have the funds at the moment to buy green-stuff, sawdust, wood filler, or a hacksaw.

Maybe I'll draw a picture or two... maybe try something like this.

First Sculpt Ever!

So I've finally taken the plunge and started sculpting my own Troll for use in Bloodbowl. I have to say, its rather exhilarating, and not quite as difficult as I imagined. Granted, I have spent a lot of time swearing under my breath while trying to manipulate the knead-a-tite, but once you get the hang of it, it really isn't so bad. Granted the quality is no where near a professional standard, but for my purposes, I think it'll do nicely. And it'll cost much less money than the $30+ Trolls that you can find elsewhere.

As I've said, I have very little money-- but tons of time.

Pictured above is the first step of layering putty onto a paperclip armature into the rough form of the body. I decided to leave the arms off for now, as I think it will make sculpting some of the torso detail a little easier.

Since this Troll is a Bloodbowler, I decided he should have some shin pads. Don't know why, but the idea of a Troll in shin pads makes me smile.

To make them, I simply took a couple of small cones of putty and squished them flat with my ruler. Make sure to keep both of the surfaces lubricated so the putty won't stick. I then got a roughly uniform shape with my sculpting tools (right now i'm using bargain dental tools, but I'm going to try making my own soon) and then presses the lines in to represent padding.

Then I just transferred them to the figure. I made some straps and a belt in much the same way, using a roll instead of a cone.

 For the shorts, I just flattened out some putty 'discs' as thin as I could and slapped them on. I didn't worry too much about tears and holes, since I figured a troll probably wouldn't bother with a sewing kit for his uniform. The best part was that the putty wrinkled itself in much the same way that real cloth would, and so required very little shaping.

 All in all, I'm having a lot of fun with this project so far. There is some serious zen to sculpting, perhaps even more so than with painting. And it really doesn't take too long to get some good results. I only really work for around 45 minutes at each stage. Beyond that and the putty will start to harden and become difficult to work.

Back From the Wild & Hobby Time To-Do List

I must apologize to my follower for the lack of content over the last several (yikes) weeks. I have spent my exile in the silent wilderness beyond the edges of this blog stalking that ever elusive pray... a job.

Also, Sveta and I have moved into a new apartment. Naturally that whole process has taken a lot of time. Good news, though-- I'm going to get my own study!

Picture this little room with a big ole desk in it, covered in hobby goodness. Actually, if you want a currently accurate idea, picture it full of boxes. *Sigh*

 Anywho, I have managed to get some things done, so look out for them over the next few days.

In the meantime, I find that the projects I want to do are starting to multiply in my head-- to the extent that if I don't put them down I fear they too might be lost to the silent wilderness.

Projects to do:

Bloodbowl:

• Finish painting/ modeling the Bashington Redskins
• Assemble, sculpt, and paint the Axe-Pick Murphys (dwarf team).
• Paint my human team (probably not going to bother making it complete, but we'll see)
• Get my hands on some Mantic Games elf scouts to convert into a high elf team.
• Finish my custom Bloodbowl Pitch.
• Pre-register for the Chaos Cup and book a hotel room.

Skulldred

• Make a couple of warbands! This will include a lot of sculpting.
• Make a battle mat out of VFF Suede
• Make some scenery-- this will include more trees, some hills and rocks, ruins, a couple of magical objectives, and some treasure/item tokens.

 Red Sand, Black Moon 

• Make up some gladiator profiles (I'll use my skulldred warband figs to represent them. Kill two birds with one miniature!)
• Come up with my own setting, compatible with my skulldred setting.

Beer Brewing

• Get a job, make some money to buy ingredients, and brew some dang beer. Oh yeah, and move all of my equipment from my old apartment. Ugh.

 Aside from all of this, I've been thinking about ways in which I might be able to design a multi-system, multi-scale narrative campaign incorporating Skulldred, RSBM, Warmaster, and maybe even some dungeon crawling. I think I could make a pretty awesome and engaging story this way.

But that's a long way off and a lot of thinking from now. If you're reading this, leave a comment on any cross-system campaigning you've done, and what you thought. Or just leave any old comment. 

I should probably just start by playing a campaign in each of these systems separately. That in itself will take some time.

And on that note, I must away! There is much to do!

Oh, and Peace.