Monday, January 25, 2010

Workbench Update: Dertflinghan Begins

One of the projects I plan to complete this year is a 28mm Gothic Horror gaming environment. As some readers are aware, I've recently painted a werewolf band to use with the Chaos In Carpathia skirmish ruleset. However, as with my Legends of the Old West project last year, painting the models is only the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to an adventure gaming project, I like to create the world itself, and therefore put as much (or more) effort into terrain-making as I do into the model-painting. After a number of false starts since Xmas, I finally started rolling with it and painted my first Eastern European building.


The building is from Hovels in the UK. I was disheartened at first as I was sent a fairly messy batch of buildings. Half of them were clogged with resin residue, and in a couple of cases, I had to use a high-speed tool to clean out the clogged areas and use green stuff to re-sculpt the window frames. Now that the buildings are cleaned and primed, the work begins, and I'm hoping to moved through most of this rather quickly. As you can see, there is nothing fancy about the paint job, but there's only so much you can do with a log cabin in the transylvanian wilderness.


The rest of the buildings are primed and ready to go. Now that the test building is finished, I hope to paint them during this week.



I made a ton of these split-rail fences one evening while I was watching a movie and procrastinating from painting miniatures. Three posts made from thick matchsticks are glued to a Popsicle stick, and a couple of days later, I weaved through the posts with a thin wicker-type reed that was part of a Xmas flower arrangement that my wife was about to throw out. Now that they're primed I'll paint them the same colour scheme as the buildings.


The barrels also came from Hovels. I used the high-speed hand tool to remove the vegetables from the two smallest barrels and used green stuff to "fill" them with water.


These pieces of mat were recent hand-me-downs from Marc. He had them leftover after a recent building project so I stuck them to thick card bases and sanded them. When I base them up I think that they'll make serviceable fields for lots of different 28mm games in the group.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my progress and to prove that I haven't fallen completely into inactivity. Before long we'll be sharing our blood-curdling adventures as the Mannleigh expedition sets off to solve a forgotten family mystery in the cursed hamlet of Dertflinghan.

Thanks for reading,
JET

3 comments:

Keir said...

Nicely done.

Andrew said...

You didn't prime with spray paint, did you? These cabins are nice. Colonial American cabins usually appear to be much simpler in construction, but I wouldn't be surprised if some European immigrants decorative cabins like these—especially in New Sweden.

JET (aka Jason) said...

I did prime with spray paint, which is the only way in my book. I don't have the patience to hand prime.

The models are actually listed under Hovels Eastern European range, and they look very convincing to me, a guy who knows very little about Eastern European vernacular architecture.