A couple of M4’s for my WW2 US in Italy forces, great value for only £8.40p for two tanks. Picked up from WMMS Show a couple of years ago, also got two stugs in the stash to be brought into service over the next few months. Pleased with how these turned out, with the addition of some Early War Miniatures stowage items they really come to life.
Within my South European/Mediterranean skirmish terrain I wanted to have one building with a more aristocratic feel, without going the full stately home/palace vibe, with the resulting very large building footprint. So I thought a hunting lodge small summer house would fit the bill. I also added a small walled garden. Lots of the painting from the Franco Prussian war featured estate type walls, and as they make ideal cover for skirmish games it seemed an ideal opportunity to build something similar.
Every village needs a church, I based mine very loosely around the cemetery of St Privat by Alphonse Marie de Neuville as featured in his painting of the Battle of Gravelotte during the Franco Prussian war. The gate and the wall being the main features I copied from the painting. The church itself is all from my imagination. I was looking to create something with a rustic rural look, nothing to imposing.
I gave the roof of the church some battle damage and also made lots of strike marks on the walls and around the gate. Nothing that looks to much like WW2 combat damage, so no long lines of impact marks from machine gun fire. Making to terrain believable for earlier conflicts.
Some very old troop who have benefited from my enforced confinement over the last year. Purchased in the late 1990’s they and their Persian enemies are for using in small skirmish games. The shields are all painted free hand.
The Persians are supported by four Nubian archers, who last appeared in the blog in April 2009, in a supporting role to a post about my desert houses. So it’s only taken them 11 years to get back in. I have always loved the black and white illustration of them in my Greeks & Romans at war book which includes Herodotus’s description of half chalk and half vermilion daubed Ethiopian archers.
Finished damaged house number two this week, pleased with how it turned out. The additional sabot bases with the rubble, smashed roof timbers and tiles can be used with the building or as stand alone terrain items. When creating the village I researched online for reference material. Lots of Franco Prussia war paintings were used for inspiration, a couple of images below give a flavour of the type of reference I based the village on.
Below are a selection of pictures showing the construction of damaged house two. I base all my 28mm scale buildings on 2mm thick plywood. As used by dolls house builders, works much better than art board with no danger of warping when glued or painted.
Around the main house base can be seen two of the sabot bases with sand and small gravel added, the gravel is from a cactus buying phase the daughter went through many moons ago, I got a lifetime supply out of that phase. Also added are some granite chipping’s from the pavement out side our estate. A pile of foam bricks cut up from the removed poly board can be seen in the second photo.
Damaged house 1 from my 28mm scale generic south European village. I wanted to have at least a couple of damaged if not totally flattened houses amongst the half dozen houses making up the village. One thing I like to see in other people’s terrain is building which when modelled in a damaged state don’t look as though some one has been round and swept most of the rubble, smashed beams and roof tiles away!
To try and represent a realistically damaged house the first thing I do is build the whole house without any damage. Making it easy to get the right amount of rubble to go with the house. With damaged houses I always paint the insides to represent wallpaper on the walls, I keep it simple and use marker pens to add simple stripes or designs.
Initial opposition for my Macedonian army, only nine elements of the required twelve finished yet, the cavalry are all H&R figures, the three archer units are Irregular figures as are the chariots. The elephant units are a combination of the two manufacturers, three elephants per stand, Irregular in the centre flanked by slightly smaller H&R elephants on both sides.
I’ve only had these figures for this last 20 years, finally painted over the last few months. Pleased with how they have turned out so far, still more to finish, only 11 of the 12 units finished for the basic DBA army. I’m going for 24 unit army’s for BBDBA of Macedonian, Persian, Indian and Scythian.
All the Macedonian figures are from Heroic & Ross, some of the other army’s include Irregular figures which although very different in style to the H&army figures, but paint up really well, more of these to follow in the next few posts.
Just a quick post of a test picture of my generic south European village, which at a stretch could cover southern France, Italy, Spain
Well it’s been a while! And how the world has moved on. But let’s not talk about that bit.
Today is my first day as a none member of the working population since the mid 1980’s due to the combination of redundancy/retirement. So what to do?
This place is distinctly dusty and unloved at the moment, so as I’ve rashly promised in the past, time for some updates, this is just a test to check out the new interface, and using an iPad. So fingers crossed as to how this will look.
Over the WFH & lockdown I have managed to be quite productive for me:
FPW Prussian jägers 28mm x16
1/300 H&R Macedonian v Indians (only had the figures since the 1980’s)
28mm South European generic village, still a WIP
Some 54mm WSS figures
So over the next few weeks I’m aiming to update around the topics above, fingers crossed this works.
TTFN Airhead - Stay safe.
