Final Damaged Houses and thoughts for 2013

The first post of the new year, is finishing off the damaged houses for down town Asmara, final touches have included adding some signs and posters from the great selection available at the Rapid Fire website page 4 of the site has a good selection. Adding some smoke and blast damage. Also plastering over the joins between the sheets of foam-board which were still visible and re-painting where needed.

Christmas brought a nice crop of wargaming related offerings, a box of Perry mounted men at arms, giving me the full medieval set now. Some skytrex 1/144th WW1 aircraft for my 10mm early war project. 

So onto the traditional setting of objectives for the year, which will inevitably fall by the way side of real life and the "SQUIRAL" like attention span of yours truly. 

1) WW1 early on 1914, 10mm scale Pendraken figures, GHQ card buildings for the terrain, with some scratch building, canal, slag heaps, flooding. This terrain to double up for WW2 blitz period and Sea lion UK also in 10mm scale. (this one has been on the list for at least the last 3 years, with a very small amount of progress)

2) More of the same for my 15mm scale North/East African town for early WW2/Modern set ups

3) In a larger scale, 28mm scale Spanish/Italian village for Napoleonic/WW2 skirmish gaming

4) 15mm Vietnam Fire base/SF camp.

5) More explosion markers of various types

6) 2mm Battle in a cigar box, with rules based on Bob Cordery's Portable wargames rules

That's all I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure other things will crop up as the year goes on. Hope you all got what you were hoping for at Christmas and that 2013 will bring you and yours health and good fortune. All the best for now.

TTFN

Airhead

Pounding the rubble

A quick post of some pictures of one of my destroyed building showing one of the dugouts with the rubble bung removed and replaced with an explosion marker. You can see on the explosion marker some flying boulders painted in the same colour as the rubble. This also shows the benefits of having a consistent basing strategy. Mine is base around 1p / 2p coins  for my 15mm collections, and supporting terrain items such as explosion markers are also based on these coins.

TTFN

Airhead

Down town Asmara + paint

Finally started to get some paint onto the down town area of Asmara, you can see in the background the black undercoated buildings waiting in the wings. In the bottom picture you can see a couple of make shift sun shades/market stalls on the roofs of the front two buildings, still waiting for some paint to be applied. The idea being that all the flat roofs of the buildings will have some kind of clutter on them. Barrels, boxes, tables and also sat-alight dishes and air-conditioning units to give the town a current feel. All of these items will be free standing. Also last but not least a fine selection of rugs, found as a pdf on the Internet, unfortunately for the life of me I can't remember where from.

On a final note, I'm quite chuffed that this is my 32 post of this year, looking at my posting rate earlier in the year I thought that I would fail to match last years by a mile. Lots of pictures and ideas in the bank for next year, and a couple more posts at least this year.

TTFN

Airhead

Destroyed houses 4

More progress made on the destroyed houses, painted after under coating in matt black Humbrol enamel paint. Working out well if I do say so myself. The bottom picture shows the two dugouts with there stoppers removed, and the small stopper from the semi circle rubble base on the right. One more stage to go, I'm going to add in some more random bits of rubbish to the bases, bits of wire, tubing, wine bottle foil and any other bits and bobs I can think of.

TTFN

Airhead

Battle damaged houses 3

Good progress being made at the moment on a number of projects, it's amazing what you can do in 20 snatched minutes each morning, before leaving for work. The 4 pictures above show the 2 battle damaged houses as they currently stand, I need to add some dark grey/black smoke damage and more bullet strikes to the brick work, especially around the doors and windows. I'm also looking into adding some graphics, posters, street names and general street stuff.

The insides of the houses have to be a compromise between being able to position troops within the building and adding to the inside as much rubble and timbers as possible. I'm pleased with how the green/blue paint has worked on the outsides of the buildings, I have used these colours in picking out some of the rubble on the rubble bases which correspond the the two houses.

Small Mosque

Anew building to add to the town, a small Mosque. The top two pictures show the building as it stands at the moment. Bottom picture is my original sketch of the building. Thinking about this building after getting it to this stage of construction it occurred to me that I had done no research on Mosques at all, not even a simple search on Google images. You can also see how the model differs from the sketch, with the number of arches in the inner building and the main door have been changed. The small ball on the top of the tower is a polystyrene one you can purchase these from craft shops. To make up for my lack of research,  I'm going to look into using some elaborate ceramic tile patterns on the inside of the building and main walls, and perhaps a small dome on the roof to go along side the minaret.

TTFN

Airhead

Destroyed houses 2

More progress on the destroyed town houses, the top picture shows one of the houses on its "L" shaped base with its add on bases of rubble around it. You can make out in the right angle of the "L" a cutout dugout with the plug in place. The bottom two pictures show one of the other bases with the two dugouts filled and removed.

On another topic, I came across a great post on the SD painting forum, linking to a blog, showing how to make a gaming matt. Not something that I had ever really considered before reading this post has got me interested in the possibilities. So something to look into in the future.

TTFN

Airhead

Destroyed houses 1

Work in progress on the destroyed houses, the top three pictures show the "L" shaped bases with the foam board sections cut out and in position, ready to be cut to shape. Creating smooth rounded shapes which can then have rubble built up on them. Along side the "L" shaped main sections are the rubble section bases. One of the houses has a 2p size section cut out which will be used as a dug out. The other two will also have dug outs cut into them. Which when not in use can have the plugs replaced, covering up the dug out holes.

The bottom picture shows the first three stages of constructing the rubble bases, the top one still needs the small grit adding.

TTFN

Airhead

Battle damaged houses 2

Progress on the battle damaged versions of the Asmara town house, the top picture shows the 3 areas of rubble which can be added to the L shaped base of the house. Two semi circles and one quarter circle of art board are used to base the rubble on. Health and safety warning!!! the larger bits of rubble are made from smashed up ceramic tiles, this process involves a concrete garage floor, an old bit of carpet (over the tiles) and a hammer. The ceramic tiles can be very sharp when smashed up, I drew blood on more than one occasion. So, best to wear gloves and eye protection when getting medieval on your tiles.

The idea of using the broken up tiles came to me when re-tiling one of the bathrooms at Airhead towers. Funny how the mind wonders when doing DIY. To create the look I wanted for the rubble I combined the broken ceramic tiles with Granite chippings from the local footpath, grit for use with cactus plants and sand. The combination of these different types of material worked well.

TTFN

Airhead 

Down town Asmara

I've made good progress over the last week with my buildings for down town Asmara, the capital of my version of 1930's Italian Eritrea. I have finished of the tops of all the houses with roof details. I have also beefed up the PVA and sand on the lower parts of the outside walls. Details such as windows with grills over them and general touching up has taken place. The next stage will be to under coat them in matt black paint, and decide on how I'm going to paint them, currently I'm thinking along the lines of having a restricted pallet of colors based around the other buildings I have already built, which mainly involves the use of Greens and Blues.

The next stage in the development of the town will to be the construction of the slum end of town, with lots of small huts and shanties. I'm also thinking about creating some battle damaged versions of the town houses above.

TTFN

Airhead

The Old Town 2

Down town old Asmara finally taking shape, after posting the original design sketches in January 2010, how can it be that long ago? well they do say time flies when you are having fun. I still need to add some more detail, such as outside steps and more clutter to the roofs. I also need to have a look at creating the roof inserts from the original sketches, to bring the buildings into the 21st century, with sat-alight dishes and air-conditioning units. The next stage will involve moving on to the shanty town section of Asmara.

Coastal gun battery

So here we have all the bits of the gun battery put together, nothing stuck together yet, so things may change a bit in the final version. The top two pictures show the bunker with the roof of, exposing the workings of the turret, the key thing is to find 2 cardboard tubes that slip into each other, quite close fitting is the best. This will allow the guns to traverse left to right once the roof is glued into position securing the outer tube and leaving the inner one with the guns glued in position free to rotate.

Finished radio station

The Hawaiian camper van is transformed into a WW2 radio station. Radio Il Duce East Africa, or alternatively BBC radio Asmara. The satelight dish is free standing and can be added in to move the bunker a current location in the middle east. The antenna are made from paper clip wire, glued into cotton bud plastic tubes, with a selection of beads to add detail. The satelight dish stands on a based made from a DIY tile spacer.

DFS / Radio station update

Just a quick update on the DFS project and the radio station, the top picture shows the radio station with the first base colour on the ground work and the radio shack in Russian ww2 green base coat. I paint all the ground work on my terrain projects with the same three match pots working from a biscuit brow through to a magnolia white in the top layers.

The picture of the DFS model shows it having its left wing glued on with PVA and some blue tack to keep the wing in place while the glue sets. The picture also shows the flap on the wing has been cut and scored so it can be positioned in the down position.

Communications bunker

My last few posts have been focused on the aviation side of my current projects, so this time back to a more terrain based projects. This communications bunker/hut/shed thing? not sure what it should be called really, is built around a camper van which come in a set of three vehicles bought (£1.69p) because it included a OH-6 Loch Helicopter which I can use for my 15mm Vietnam project. See my post from November 26th LINK for a picture of the camper van in all its glory and original packaging. As I said in that post, the van did go in the bin, only for me to fish it out, after having second thoughts.

The ground work was built up with scrap foam board, which was then covered with polyfilla, pva glue, sand and small rocks. The entrance to the bunker has coffee stick duck boards and the supports for the trench walls are made from cut down cable ties, which have some nice detail on, which should dry brush up well. Cut of the top of one of the cable ties and stuck it on the top of the van, to add a bit of detail. The aerials are from paper clip wire in cotton bud tubes.

I'll also build a free standing satellite dish, so it can be used in a WW2 or more modern setting.