This last week has yielded decent progress on my new 15mm African buldings for my imagi-nation campaign. I've gotten all of the basic paint on the buldings, and got the two ruined building more or less finished with the exception of a little flock.
The roofs are in progress with the basic structure roughed out for about half of the buildings. They will be skinned with textured sheet simulating various types of metal roofing and then painted.
Here are a few pics of the progress:
As usual, I didn't get as far as I had hoped over the weekend, but I did get the walls assembled for the new African houses, plus a couple of ruined buildings. I decided to make them modular, so that I can use the buildings in different arrangements, or as the original "compounds". Here are pics of the current status:
I first coated the bottom edge of the split stock with a coat of mat medium, that way I can glue the walls to the bae with super glue, which makes construction much faster, than it might oterwise be.
I started using Woodland Scenics flock around 1987 to bring a little more spark to my modular game terrain for 6mm micro armor. About half of that first batch of terrain is still in use (some of it was damaged in a move in 1995), as is a large amount of terrain that I made in 1989 with 15mm gaming in mind.
I've added terrain almost every year since 1987 and now have modular terrain for eight settings, both multi-scale and scale specific pieces, for use with 6 to 28mm figs. Over 700 square feet of it in all, sits on and under my table, and on shelves all over the basement. And, all of it is covered with Woodland Scenics flock.
Over the years, I've used just a couple of bags/bottles of flock from other manufacturers, when colors not made by WS were needed. The primary reason that I stayed with WS was availability and ability to match new terrain to old.
In recent years, you may have noticed some variation in the color of terrain tiles depicted on my blog. The first time I really noticed the variation in WS color batches was in the mid 1990s, just subtle variations then, though more dramatic in recent years.
I use a custom mix for my primary yellow terrain, and for my jungle terrain. The primary color for my green terrain is the WS Grass Blend. When applying flock, I first apply other shades to contrast high and low spots and to just create some variation in general. The last step is to apply the primary color, which covers the overwhelming majority of the completed tile.
More recently, a shift in the WS Grass Blend has been more of an issue, and will lead to my re-flocking somewhere around 250 square feet of green terrain. The start of this process took place a few weeks back, when I made a point to consolidate containers of flock, and make sure that everything was dated or labelled to make matching new batches as easy as possible in the future.
During that process, I took a few pics of the flock from various WS batches over the years to compare.
First up is the WS Light Yellow fine flock:
The bottle on the left dates to 2019, the middle to some time prior to 2017, and the bottle on the right is from a bag that dates to the mid 1990s. As time progresssed, the light yellow got darker, more brown, then lightened up a little.
Next is the Earth Blend:
The leftmost bottle dates to January 2019, the second was purchased in 2017, and third is from somewhere between 2016 and 2010, and the one on the right is from a bag dating to 1998. particularly noticeable on the finished tiles is that the newer blend has a more dramatic contrast between the lightest and darkest particles, which is most obvious between the second and last bottles above.
The Grass Blend has seen the most notable change:
In recent years the green Grass Blend has shifted to being darker and greener, less yellow than in years past. I don't have any older grass blend on hand but can show the difference in the tiles. The top left tile dates to 2022, the top right to 1989 and the bottom to roughly 1997.
Some other colors have changed over the years as well. Last year, I contacted Woodland Scenics to try to figure out what the fine light green grass that I had used for decades might have been, as I could not find an equivalent on the WS site. I had finally used up my container of light green that dated to 1988 or earlier. The material had originally come in bags, which had been loaded into the old round "scenic spreaders" decades ago.
As it turned out, they informed me that they never offered a fine light green, and as the material was definitely a WS product (I was unfamiliar with any other brand until some time in the 1990s), I concluded that it was most probably a light batch of Burnt Grass that I had used all of these years.
This lead to a search for a new light green, which ended up coming in the form of Scenic Express Fine Light Green flock. It had a more coarse texture than the WS product, so I sifted it out and used the really fine particles in making my "West German" terrain last year. It worked out okay, though is a little brighter than I'd like, particularly in contrast to the now darker WS Grass Blend.
In any event, I figured that I'd share my observations on the chance that they might be useful some how.
I recently did some tweaking to my Vietnam rules, playing a bit with the details of covering fire and leadership. It has been quite some time, since I played anything set in Vietnam, and as I can't get my African game on the table yet (still need to build some buildings), I decided to test out the tweaks that I recently made for Vietnam.
My 20mm Vietnam games are skirmish oriented, though games with up to a company can be fielded on my table, They feature individually mounted figures, use a ground scale of either 2, 5, or 10 meters per inch depending on scope of the game and table size, and can include details such as tracking ammo and wounds.
Since the game was just to test the tweaks, I ran a completely fictional one-off scenario, with one US squad bumping into one PAVN squad near some abandoned hootches. A few pics and description follow below.
Note that usually I take pics with both my camera and my phone, as either can act up or have trouble with the lighting in various situations. In this case, I only used my iphone, which, given the opportunity, let me down by taking mostly soft, fuzzy pictures. Nothing on the lense, no change to settings, it is just evil (what else can I atribute it to) and does this from time to time. Sorry that the photos aren't better. As always, click on the pics for pigger versions.
I completed the recently discovered box of 6mm buildings from Levin Miniatures, plus a couple of my own creations for my WWIII games. I added 24 buildings in all, nearly doubling the number available for populating my towns and cities of WWIII.
Here are some pics; the first four show the buildings from Levin:
About three weeks back, I bumped into a box of 6mm buildings that my wife got me for Christmas, two years back, and figured that I'd finish them off, as I'll need them for upcoming WWIII battles. Figuring that they'd take me a week to paint, I'm now three weeks into them, and have a part of my game table tied up with the process.
The occupation of my game table is holding up playing anything at the moment, and given that the next game is Uwanda-Mugabia War battle, I've now discovered an additional delay. The next battle, between ULF and Soviet forces, takes place in a city and requires the use of 15mm buildings more or less matching the 6mm buildings that I made just before Covid. Turns out, that I never finished them, and completely forgot.
So, expecting that I'll have the 6mm buildings done this weekend (they are over 3/4 done at this point), I figure that there will be another delay of 1-2 weeks, finishing the 15mm African buildings, before getting on to my game.
This will sort of cause me to deviate from my "game plan" regarding focusing on no more than ten projects, as building stuff for 15mm African imagi-nations isn't on the current list, but my campaign is dead in the water otherwise, and thus, staying on mission would stop me from playing games, which is the opposite of the purpose of the mission. Life is so complex.
When I haven't been working on the 6mm buildings, I've been researching campaigns for both 1940 France and Operation Barbarossa.
The 1940 campaign is farther along in development, with work revolving around creating a general list of of scenarios along three or four lines of advance to be played out, rather than trying to play out the entire invasion of France and Belgium. The campaign will start out being historical, though will deviate from the historical path and loose plan of scenarios as dictated by results on the tabletop.
Barbarossa is a little less far along, as I am still developing the scope of the campaign, though expect that it will be similar to the 1940 campaign.
While buildings have been drying and whatnot, I've also made a little progress on the WWIII aircraft that are slowly coming along, and completed some 15mm field fortifications that can be used for various WWII and Cold War era games.
Despite the upcoming deviation from my "game plan", three months into the it, the plan has been somewhat successful, narrowing the scope of what I've been working on, and allowing me to better use my available time.
Once the African buildings are done, I will wrap up the WWIII 1958 aircraft, and the France 1940 aircraft (several still need decals), which will wrap up work on the 6mm versions of both of those periods. The 15mm versions of these periods still requiring the addition of some buildings for the tabletop, prior to calling them "done".
I'll post a few pics of the 6mm Buildings, after the weekend.
Be safe out there.
This past week I received 15mm decals for British, French, and Soviet aircraft from Miscellaneous Miniatures. The British decals are of the Type "D" roundel. Here's a quick pic:
The sheets are $5.00 US each, look great, and service was fantastic. I believe that I ordered them on Sunday and had them on Tuesday.
This filled in a void that I was finding, when it came to options for Cold War era aircraft. The sizes will work particularly well for several of the early Cold war jets that I'm working on.
I've got a number of models in process and will share some pics, once I get them finished.
