Who let Bill have the airbrush!

Work progresses on my preparations for Bayou Wars.  I'm just about finished "prettying up" the shoreline cloth with my airbrush, adding sandy beach and some broken up patches of color to represent farms and so on.  I'm not entirely happy with it - in hindsight, the field bits should have been much smaller - but it's good enough for government work.



Here you can clearly see where I let the airbrush hose drag across the lake in the corner  :/  I'll touch that up once it's dried.


And, from the seaward side.  Next to (and under) the compressor you can see some of the masks I used while spraying.  In some places I used the masks, in others I didn't bother.  Overall it went pretty well, except for the numerous times I forgot myself and dragged the hose through freshly applied paint.

Once it's all dried (and I fix the lake in the corner) I'll set up with my hex grid template and put the hexes on in white paint.  Once they are in place, I'll lay out the ocean cloth, put this one on top and see how it looks.

Preparing for Bayou Wars

I've slipped a bit (ok, a lot) from my New Year's resolution, due to some unpleasant family events.  Now I find myself with just over two months to get ready for a playtest of my game for Bayou Wars this year.  To keep track of where I'm at and help me stay focused, I put a list of what I need to do in the sidebar.  As I complete tasks, I'll mark things off the list.  When something interesting happens, I'll post about it as well.

Resolutions

I've realized that I haven't been keeping this updated, or getting much work done on much of anything for a while. No real reason for it, I'm just easily distracted. Thus, in addition to the usual New Years' resolution failures (lose weight, keep up with the housekeeping, etc.) I've also resolved to put paint on figures every day I'm at home and to update the blog at least monthly. So, to further that, photos of the month's work.

First, some German Aeronef from Brigade Models, ordered from Wizard's Workshop.

(As usual, click on the pictures for larger versions.)

This is the German Fleet Pack #3, mostly completed.  I still need to detail the windows and finish up the bases with nametags.  I misplaced the labels I use for the nametags, and need to find them or get new ones. 

All were primed with Liquitex grey gesso and painted (Ceramcoat color names unless stated otherwise) with Hippo Grey hulls, Bambi Brown covered with Golden Brown decks, and Folk Arts' Parchment for the windows.  Tail markings are Black, Parchment and Vallejo's Flat Red. 

A Moltke class Battlecruiser

Prince Heinrich heavy cruiser

Karlsruhe destroyer leader. 

The pack should have had two of the Karlsruhe and a VA7 patrol nef, but mine had three Karlsruhe instead.

These are fun and pretty quick to paint up.  The tail marking suffer from my inability to paint a straight line, so I'm going to try to make decals (with the Testors decal kit) to replace them.  We'll see how well it works out.

We'll also see how well the resolutions work out.  Maybe I'll manage to finish up some of these other projects on my workbench.

Plans for '09

In the spirit of Matakishi and others, what I plan to do in the coming year:

• More Aeronef. I've got a few more ships to paint up and I need to build some terrain, all for a club game mid-year.
• Aliens and Colonial Marines.  I ordered a pile of both from Wargames in their QRF clearance, and I have some paper terrain files from Ebbles Minis that I can scale to 15mm and build up.  This will be run with THW's 5150 rules.
• Star Wars.  I've got a pile of SWMB figures I picked up last year, and I have a notion to run a Crossfire game with them.  
• Victorian Colonial Mars.  This is a long fourth, and will likely end up a 2010 project instead (or even later).  I've got some vague ideas for using TSaTF for British vs native battles on the Red Planet, but I haven't even decided what scale to use yet.

There.  Now that I've divulged my plans, I'm sure that I'll end up getting none of this done and doing something completely unrelated.

And now the French

And now the French 'Nef are also complete.  I noticed some little things in the photos that I'll need to sort out, and both these and the British need clearcoats, but they're playable now.

As requested, I also took individual shots of all of the ships. Those pictures are below, first the British:

The Agincourt.

The Britannia.

Two Rawalpindi-class cruisers.

Two Cossacks and a Steadfast.

And, the French:

Two Formidabile cruisers

The Jeanne La Pucelle.

The L'Epee.

Two Descartes destroyers

Two Valliante destroyers.

British Aeronef

I've been working on some Aeronef ships (Brigade Models figures) for a while now, and finally finished up the British fleet.

I figured people would be interested in the name placards.  Here's how I made them.  First, I made a table in a word processor, placing the flag images in each one.  I gathered the names from lists of period ships (Thank you, Wikipedia) and filled them into the table.  I then printed it onto a sheet of adhesive label and attached it to a piece of 0.010" plastic sheet.

I cut the  placards out with a x-acto knife and straightedge, then glued them to pieces of 2mm plastic "L" beam.

Lastly I superglued them to the back of the ships's bases.