Land Office open for business

Whoopee! I got my first building for Thorncreek finished today.

I'd been dithering (how unlike me!) over how to paint the wood, and had done two rather labour intensive (multiple layers and washes) test pieces which I was fairly pleased with, but knew would be mind-numbing for a whole building or town:


So when I was out yesterday picking up some Master's Brush Cleaner (very highly recommended for bringing even nasty old splayed brushes back to life, btw) from the art shop in town, I also picked up two pots of craft paint (Chocolate and Coffee - I guess I was getting peckish!):


Some heavy drybrushing (more like wetbrushing, really) later, and taadaa! A finished building:

The Thorncreek Patrol, ever vigilant...

Quick and dirty pictures, as usual, but it keeps the impetus of blogging going and boosts my feeling of accomplishment if I post straight away I finish something. All the usual excuses about flash washing out layers, funny business from Photoshop when auto-levelling the contrast, but I'm pretty chuffed with how this turned out. The best bit is, the most time-consuming part of painting it was the couple of layers of blue on the windows!

Hope you like it,
Rab

Can't see the wood for the trees

Almost no painting undertaken this week, except to finish off another outlaw for my bad guy posse:


Mostly, I've been doing a little rooting through a box of trees I inherited, picking out the ones that are still serviceable and mounting them on washers:


A couple of pieces of street furniture to shelter behind:


And finally, the three-shops-in-one is nearly done. I'm just waiting on some model railway sheet tiling for the third roof and it'll be all ready to base up:


The purple-looking roof is some corrugated modeling card I found in a cheapo shop; far quicker than preparing the cat-food-box as I described in an earlier post - life is too short! The right-hand roof is overlapped strips of masking tape that I hope will paint up like tar-paper. We shall see.

Happy geeking,
Rab

State of play (ing with toy soldiers)

Before I get stuck in, I thought I'd give you a quick tour of the workbench as it is now, and please forgive the hurried snaps.

First up, the boss of my Outlaws for Legends of the Old West (just finished, I thought, but I've obviously missed putting a wash on that bit on his right sleeve):


Next, the rest of the boys, in various states of preparation:


There's also another shop, or rather three which I'm doing in one go to speed me along:


On a completely unrelated note, the gang are getting back into another fantasy football game, Elfball from the rather fabulous Impact miniatures. This is my ancient Eqyptian themed team in progress:


And finally, I couldn't resist putting together the first of the 135 (!) mostly plastic Napoleonic figures that Ma and Pa got me for Christmas. I shall paint them with the nice new brushes that sister number one got me. They've finally given in and decided that geeking stuff is a valid present :)

How cats helped win the West

I hope you'll be pleased to know that I haven't been just been sitting sulking about GW for the last few days, I've also been beavering away on the first building for Thorncreek, which I think is in the southern part of Colorado. This should allow mountains, plains, and (at a stretch) the occasional gang of Mehican bandidos that are on the run from down south. Well, quite a big stretch...

In case any of you would like to see how I did it, I've laid out the in progress pictures below. The method is very heavily based on this set of articles over on Geektactica, and using Gungnir's sterling work as inspiration as well.

First off, I measured out some templates (sorry, can't find the picture, but it's not that exciting anyway) for the walls, cut them out of 5mm foamcore and glued them square. I then started cladding the walls with the splints/spills/little-bits-of-balsa-like-wood-for-lightning-bunsen-burners-with. This took quite a while!




The elastic band was to hold the end piece in place while the glue dried. Use lots of glue!


More cladding in place...


I realised I had to add a pointy roof bit on the back of the false front to support the roof - lesson learned for next time, when I'll just make two of the back end pieces and stick one on the back of the false front.


This is where the cats come in! The corrugated iron roofing is made from the box my cat's food pouches come in. I just peeled off the outer layer and was left with the beautifully even corrugations you can see :) It took a little while to find the best way of removing the little bits of 'outer' that stuck to the bits I wanted, but I found that a sculpting tool scraped down each corrugation allowed me to clear the stubborn bits off in about ten minutes. Free and reused - bonus!

The finished building! I trimmed the scrappy bits of foam core around the windows so that they were smooth and stuck bits of splint to form door/window frames. I stuck the whole lot onto some thick card, put a ridge-cap over the tin roof, backed the door/window holes with thin card and used some more of the base card to make a front door. I cut two pieces of thin card rectangle to make the sign, removing the central section from one and sticking it over the other to make a frame. The boardwalk was made by gluing a few modelling matchsticks (from a massive bag I picked up for a song) at right angles to the direction I laid the planks which were more splints. I'm pretty chuffed with it for a first attempt, and now that I've done it once I reckon I'll be much quicker next time.





What will I use it for? As I hope my future buildings will be less crude, this should really be the oldest Thorncreek building. The Land Office, perhaps? Suggestions on a postcard...

TTFN