Thursday, 18 March 2010

Fields of Zama

Sorry that my hithertoo regular posts have become somewhat sporadic!  I've been very busy with life in general, and some very time-consuming and non-photogenic elements of the Zama project.

Here is one such element.  These fields (and others not shown here) all needed to be cut into shape, trimmed, shaved with my Wahl hair trimmer and dyed with diluted acrylic paint.


The next stage will be to stick them onto the terrain boards.  Then I'll need to dress the terrain boards with clumps of static grass, leaves, weeds and whatever.  The board project is now around 75% complete!  Never again.  ;-)

Saturday, 13 March 2010

4" Drybrush Day

Today I drybrushed the 9 terrain boards, with a mid-brown and then a highlight, using the biggest brush I could find!

 Here's a board drying in what passes for sun around here.

Here are a couple of boards with the first highlight.  I hope to apply a very sparse second highlight, tomorrow.  The colour I went for is a sort of raw umber with a bit of tan in it.  It looks a bit grey in the photos, but it is slightly browner IRL.

The boards will look (somewhat) less austere when the fields and tufts of vegetation are added.  I feel an awful lot better about the project, as they are starting to look like something a man could stick a wargame figure on!

Thursday, 11 March 2010

Scene of Devastation

Here's the gaming table after the latest play test of the Zama game (mentioned yesterday), using Command and Colors blocks.  When we packed up at 11:30, the game was getting near a conclusion, with Carthage (far side of table) somewhat ahead on account of the over-powerful elephants mentioned in the comments on the previous post.  Each of the blocks represents 2-4 figures, and the board on the day will be three times as long.

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Numidian Elephants

I realised today that I haven't posted a picture of the elephants that will stand (possibly all too briefly!) before the Carthaginian front line in the Zama game.  Here are 6 of the 10; a mix of Essex, Gripping Beast and (converted) Renegade.  The other 4 are in the collection of Dr. Simon.

Monday, 8 March 2010

Board 7 of 9

My increasing gaps in posting have been caused by the need to break the back of the Zama terrain, which is proving to be very time-consuming.  I'm trying to get all the Zama boards textured and base coloured before I go on to the next stage, highlighting.

Here's an iffy pic of board 7.  You can see gaps I've left for the teddy bear fur fields; these will be trimmed, coloured and added later on.  The base colour doesn't show up well; the boards are a dark chocolate brown.


I've designed the tracks so that the boards can be combined to make either a 4' by 18' table surface, or a 6' or 8' by 8', so hopefully they will be useful for a variety of other projects in the future.

I still need to find a way to indicate the apexes of the hexes; I'm thinking that I may use pins, pressed into the styrofoam.  These could be removed if I recide to use the boards for something different and non-hex based, later on.

Friday, 5 March 2010

100Kday!

I'd very much like to thank all the people who have visited this site since last March, and who yesterday took my page load numbers past 100,000 hits, with just over 51,000 unique visits.  I've hugely enjoyed your feedback and comments, and hope to meet some of you in person at Bletchley and Salute.  Here's an old pic of some happy Germanic cavalry, in celebration.


 In other news,  I played my first game of Flames of War last night with some local gamers from Dark Nights and Bloody Dawns in Wood Green.  It was very enjoyable; how did I  manage to completely miss FoW until now?  The 15mm WW2 figures were both numerous and beautifully painted, and I'd very much like to use them again.  We used Western Desert minis, and I will hopefully show DNBD how a Memoir '44 Western Desert game would compare.  Might even try their minis on a big hex grid.

Finally, I will be starting board 7 for Zama, today.  Joy.

Thursday, 4 March 2010

Numidian Royal Bodyguard

These miniatures were splendidly painted by my mate Nick Speller, and based by me.  They form the Royal bodyguard of my Numidian army.  Numidian Kings often recruited Spanish cavalry "with bridles" for this role (at least in Caesar's time).  They are also the final unit my the Numidian army, which now has just under 300 minis.

I've used whatever figures came to hand; some (late lamented) Companion miniatures, sent to me by Mike Adams in the US, two Crusader Spanish and a couple of A&A Numidians.  The horses include some Aventines, and the splendid standard is Aventine.  I added rosettes and fringes to the horses to give them a Spanish flavour.


 And here they are from behind.  This shows the irregular basing style I favour on all my cavalry.


These'll be Masinissa's bodyguard at Zama.  

In other news... I hope to start the 6th terrain board today.  We also have a table number at Salute, but I don't know exactly where in the hall it is, at the moment.