Dirt Road Gas Station

I'm still sort of burnt out from making dirt roads, but still haven't jumped into the water and started making rivers. So, I made a few curves (bor-ing!), and a little roadside scene: a gas station.

The station and its roof were made from a block of Polymer clay. For the roof, I flattened out some clay and then pressed it onto the bottom of the small metal mitre box. The bottom is corrugated, and seemed to be of the right scale. I peeled the clay up and then baked. I was pretty happy with the effect. The main body of the station was roughly cut out of clay and the door and windows gouged out.

The gas pumps, the little tank on the side of the building, and the sign were made out of styrene plastic. The word GAS on the sign is not centered; I should not have used superglue to attach it. Its probably hard to tell, but on the other side of the building I have two metal drums from Heroics & Ros against the wall and a tire that I made out of a styrene tube, which was a lot more work than it was worth.

The station is mounted on a sheet of styrene that was covered over with latex caulk. The roadside scene is to connect up with the other road pieces.

This going to be the last road piece for awhile. I want to get started on my rivers.

An Apology for Comments not Posted

I want to apologize to Jim Casey and the other folks who made comments on my blog but never appeared! Your comments are valuable and I always greatly appreciate them!

My blog is set up to send an email saying that you have made a comment. A bunch of them never did get sent to my email.  They also didn't seem to initially make it to the "comments awaiting approval: until I clicked on a previous post and then all of a sudden they showed up like gangbusters.  I don't understand the selectivity of this.

I'll admit, I don't have a lot of time to get on Blogger and check things beyond just throwing up my post, hence the numerous typos and such. I still can't seem to figure out how to take a MS Word document and paste it into Blogger without all the formatting junk that I have to manually edit out, but that's another story.

I promise that I will diligently check more often to see if this happens again.

Again, I apologize to those who commented but didn't see their comments up on my blog.

Rangers of the North Part 3

I have not painted the entire pile of rangers, but enough to get an idea of how I want them to look like when painted and based. Pardon the obvious flash photography.  Its hit or miss with my phone camera in terms of getting the minis in focus. Flash guarantees it but the colors seem a little off and you get shadows in the background. After a lot of back and forth, I decided to base them two to a stand. Everyone was more or less compatible size-wise except for the Demonworld figures.

Demonworld minis

Left : Chariot Right: Peter Pig 

Left: Splintered Light, Right: Rank and File

More Rank and File

Splintered Light

I put the last two Splintered  Light rangers on separate stands. They seemed somewhat unique  compared to the others. They guy on the left looked like an old veteran, hence the grey beard. The guy on the right I call "The Dude." I gave him a grey cloak rather than a green or brown one. The lower part of The Dude's bow didn't  seem to be completely cast. But he's  cool with that; it is what it is.

15mm Sci Fi

Here are a few 15s that I painted a while back. I happened upon them while deleting a bunch of pictures on my phone. The first two are from GZG.

I  think they are supposed to be  human colonists. I painted then up to look like state troopers. I think the second one is a woman, but I'm not 100% sure.

The next one is from Rebel Miniatures  zombie survivors  line.

I think he turned out pretty well. I christened him Brother Leon while having a test game of Five Core Skirmish rules. Sadly, he rolled poorly during a fire fight against some corporate body guards. 

New Minis

I think its been over a month since my last post. I've been terribly busy with end-of-school activities and family activities. Plus my allergies have been the worst since forever. They have really wiped me out. Its a vicious cycle of not being able to sleep at night followed by being dead tired the next day. I have not enough energy to do anything at night, which is my usual time to work on stuff. It doesn't help that I've gotten hooked on Netflix's DareDevil series! It takes very little brain power to veg in front of a TV screen at night waiting for the Benadryl to kick in.  I did base a bunch of those 15mm rangers that I have been working on and will post those soon.

I ordered some stuff including some rules, and some miniatures from Splintered Light. They have commissioned a special China collection to help with a foster home in China that they are adopting a son through. I thought that its a very worthwhile cause, so I ordered one. I also ordered their space crew, but realized that I already have them. I should have ordered more of their orcs, but oh well.

Space Crew:

Several of the characters look very familiar to a Joss Weldon TV show that Fox television foolishly cancelled. Ground Zero Games also makes a version of said crew. I have a few painted up and should do a side-by-side comparison.

China Collection:

These are the three humanoid characters. Depending how I paint her, the princess would make a great female fantasy magic user. The Hu Hsien is a fox spirit or shape changer. You can read a little about them here. There are a bunch of mythological creatures included

Above are Fu Dogs that guard temples. They have special meaning to me. My father loved them. My parents had a bunch of them and he sculpted some abstract ones out of concrete that now sit in my mother's garden.

What collection would be complete without a Chinese dragon? You also get a Kirin and a Kung Fu Panda. The thing sticking off the Kirin's tail is its antlers that need to be attached.

Last, but not least are two adorable pandas.

I have been thinking about having my daughter paint everyone but the humanoids. She done some work on a few Reaper Bones figures with mixed results, but I think the Young One will enjoy painting these.

Late Night Thoughts

I just spent the last 3+ hours working on my taxes. If you live in the USA, you know what a "joy" they are. I think I can wrap them up tomorrow.  This is the latest I've ever got them done.

Two reasons for this post. First,  this is my first post made using my phone.  If there are more typos than usual,  blame it on the tiny keyboard.  Second, I've been dwelling on rules a lot. I've also been invited to play test a few. What bothers me is that I have to say no to the offers. I would love to but the way things are,  I can't promise that I would be able to actually play a game using them. Its rather depressing.

A Road Less Traveled

I got some very good feedback from my previous post where I lamented the failure of my foamcore hex rivers. Messrs. Paul and Pahoota suggested using 1 mm thick styrene plastic as a base. The thought was that the styrene wouldn't warp when I put the caulk down. I have sheets of styrene plastic in the form of For Sale signs. They have gone up a bit in price at Walmart, but $2.75 is still a steal for a fairly large sign. The guy behind the paint counter must be wondering what I am constantly selling.

Before I plunge into the river waters again, I thought I'd test it out by making roads. Here is the result:

The short section of road on the far left is one of my road hexes that goes with my forest hexes. The cross road section and the straight section of road are the test pieces. They are caulked, painted, and flocked, but I have not applied a wash on them yet.

Verdict: no warping, at least so far. One thing I did not do was add a layer of card stock on top of the plastic base. I applied the caulk directly to the plastic. I also applied the flocking that is on either side of the roads to the plastic. The reason why I added the thin card stock on my forest hexes was that I thought I needed a good substrate to hold paint and other things down. I get the feeling that the card stock was responsible for my multi-hex warping, so I might make another multi-hex but without the paper layer. I'm sure that caulk must shrink when it dries, but it could be that paper does more. It does not fully explain why the foamcore warped, but my next step is to start working on the rivers.