First batch of MENA walls

 Any decent MENA table needs walls. Lots of them. So I grabbed all the lovely Urban Scatter Gaming sets, scaled them down to 20 mm, and let my Bambu A1 Mini run for a couple of days. Among the walls are also few MDF ones that I got from a friend - these are the thin ones.

For bases, I used The Solo Wargamer’s excellent method — chopped up a few old Magic: The Gathering cards, glued on a sand‑and‑tiny‑stones mix, and called it good.

Painting was my usual recipe for this kind of stuff:

• Black primer

• Rough white highlight

• Airbrushed “holy trinity” of Tamiya earth tones — Flat Earth, Buff, Deck Tan

Bases got the same treatment minus Deck Tan, plus a rough drybrush with AMMO’s Sandy Drybrush paint followed by few Gamers Grass tufts to finish.

I’m under no illusion this will be enough — you can never have too many walls — but it’s a start. Two more sets are already waiting their turn.

Tiles, tiles, tiles! Making gaming tiles out of cardboard and styrofoam

For quite some time I wanted to make myself a gaming table at home.
Initially I planned on using big styrofoam desks that would form a 3x3, 3x4 table.
However, the wife was not pleased (too big!), so I had to look elsewhere.
Gaming mats are the buzzword lately, however - they wrap, you need to have a big enough table and they are bit boring. Plus they are 2-D!

In the end I got this terrific idea to build a customizable gaming area using 1"x " tiles made from cardboard and thin styrofoam. The logic is to have a very variable system, that would allow me to play on anything from 2x2 to 2x3, 3x3, 3x4.. you get the idea. A system that would fit on our dining table and I could easily take it to my FLGS - the tiles need to be on the flat side.

All painted and ready to play!

Onto the actual tiles - 3mm cardboard followed by approximately 5mm styrofoam - glued together with PVA glue. Once the glue has been applied put a lot of books on top of it to prevent warping. It will happen anyway, but the good thing is, you can easily fix it - just be careful and don't break it.



Now the fun part begins - I wanted city terrain, which means pavements - Initially I was thinking about using DM Scotty's stamping method, but then again, this wouldn't be proper 3-D. So I opted for carving the individual stones into styrofoam.
First I draw all the stones using a ballpoint pen, followed by carving the stones using one of the sculpting tools. If I pressed the pen a bit more, I could probably do it all at once, but I do like to draw it all first, correct mistakes and carve later (measure twice, cut once). The system for drawing the stones? Try to be chaotic! I'm trying to mix the orientation of the stones often - having all of them in one direction seems a bit boring. It usually takes me an hour, hour and a half to draw and then carve the stones - but this is something you want to do while watching telly, being on an endless confcall - it does take a while!

Work in progress

Detail of the stones - you want to mix it up!

Once cut, take some cheap black paint, big brush and paint it all black. You want your paint to be thin, as you want it to go into the cracks. Once dry mix some gray and start drybrushing. It took me 3 or 4 layers to get to a result I liked - it's better to start with a dark gray and then gradually lighten it, until you end up with pretty much pure white - this will be the lightest drybrush.

And done!

You can remove an occasional stone here and there to give the tiles a rougher look, you can use a wire brush to add a bit of rough look to the styrene, however the drybrushing alone will do that for you later on.

My plan is to have at least 6 of these with just the pavement, then some more with part pavement/part mud/rocks/earth and maybe some water - thinking about harbourside.

Durability? 
Good. Of course I haven't tested it properly, but the paint appears to stick really well (cheap acrylics), moving figures around is nice and easy (they don't stick to it, no wraps they would fall over), any minor warps can be easily fixed and tiles connect well to each other - well they lay next to each other, so if your table is flat, so will they.
Also dice roll pretty well on the surface as well.

Afghan buildings for Skirmish Sangin - almost done!

It took me a while, but today I was finally able to get some time into my Afghan buildings for Skirmish Sangin. I made them few months ago, but never got to actually painting them.

In the end the painting process was pretty simple - I spray painted the base coat (Montana black XX that costs 3$/can) gave it a few days to fully dry and then applied a heavy dry brush of a Nerchau Hobby Acryl Antique White (2$/59ml bottle) - I really did not want to use my Vallejos for such large surfaces.

Base coat applied 

Drybrush - in reality it's a bit brighter

The buildings turned out pretty great - I might revisit them with a light dry brush of pure white as a final highlight here and there. I am also still not entirely sure what to do about the insides - I will probably keep them in the base color for now - the light drybrush can be added pretty much anytime in the future.

I will add some minor details to the houses to liven them up a bit - doors, corrugated metal garage doors, maybe a satellite dish or two.

I've taken a similar approach to the several wall sections I made, which means I'm getting very, very close to having a properly painted 1-table material and could get some gaming done!

In other Skirmish Sangin news, I have two Humvees ready for painting and I'm also working on one AH-64 Apache and a Mil Mi-24 Hind (this will be more of a terrain piece with this helo being a long abandoned wreck).

PART TWO - More Pics

Give it a day and all my buildings have been drybrushed and tested on a 3x4 table - there will be a demo game in September and there's still lot to do terrain wise, but I'm getting there - I even painted the Humvees and LAV-R today! Please note, that the minis are still not 100% finished.

Aerial view of my table with a crash landed AH-64

USMC team Alpha

"Let them come"

Leader instructing his troops

Better shot of the building

House with a garage - this will need a metal door

One of the fearless Taliban warriors

First Frostgrave Ruin finished

A brief entry this time - the very first ruin I created for Frostgrave is finished.

As described in the previous post, I glued the two wall together using superglue, then used a bit of the DAS clay to fill in the holes between them and also to create the corner bricks - this is a nice way to add additional detail and hide some of your mistakes etc.

After that I glued the whole structure to a piece of thick plasticard slightly bigger than the house. Using PVA glue and various types of sand I created the ground and after it has all dried out, I went ahead with the base paint - a black primer spray paint followed by a black acrylic applied with a big brush to go where the spray paint didn't.
This took a bit more time than I expected and next time I will be priming the base before applying the glue and sand. It will probably be a bit messy, but the whole process with finding the spots where the white plasticard is still showing is not something I want to repeat.
First layer of Vallejo grey was applied followed by 2-3 additional ones - each a bit brighter than the previous one - you want to end up with a very light grey, otherwise the whole thing tends to look a bit too dark.
With the walls all painted, I turned to the terrain - dry brushing it with a black-brown mix, to be followed by some grey drybrushing - not as bright as the ones I used for the walls as I wanted to avoid them looking the same.

The kids love it!

Anyway, this was really fun, although I absolutely hated it after the first grey drybrushing session - it was just too dark and ugly.
But after a few days, I took my other greys (I have so many different shades of grey it's not even funny - and I still need more!), went ahead with the lighter tones and voila! the whole thing started to look good.

Check the photos and let me know what you think, like and don't like about it!