Gladius

A lone surviving member of a small group of soldiers that out maneuvered and held off an invading army 3000 times their size?

Child of the Norsca, sold into slavery then trained to be a successful pit fighter, destined to wear a jeweled crown upon his troubled brow? 

A disgraced Legionary General from Estalia destine to change Tilea from inside the Arena?

Who knows. Who cares. He’s a bad ass with rippling muscles, a sharp sword and a giant mowhawk.

 

The miniature itself is Gladius from Citadel’s 1986 box set BC7 Heroic Fighters of the Known World, sculpted Jes Goodwin.

I went with a classic red for his color. It looks orange in these pictures but mellowed out significantly after a couple of coats of clear. This sculpt really shows off my love for inks. I added a couple of mushrooms to the base for some real old school flavor. They are painted with Vallejo fluorescents so they glow nicely under a black light!

One of the neat little details on this guy is that Jes sculpted a big comb, obviously for his big mowhawk, on his right hip. I painted it brass and it can be seen in the second picture here.

I have a couple other figures from this box set and plan on collecting them all. Ain’t this hobby great?

Tutorial: 28mm shingles

If you are getting to be my age you might have to worry about Shingles if you had chickenpox as a kid…wait let me start over. If you’re not a Millennial then you’re probably a home owner and have to deal with a contractor to reroof your house. Na, this ain’t about any of that. This is about fake roofs and shingles. Mostly  shingles. I like to go with individual shingles as opposed the strip method. I feel like I get a more dynamic model from individual shingles.

I make them 1cm by 1.5 cm. Yes, it’s metric and it’s “too big” for 25mm, 28mm and even 32mm (scale creep!) scale, but it’s a good working size and looks good on my buildings. And that’s the most important thing. How it looks to me! 

I start out by making a sub-roof.

Made of the same card stock (cereal or beer boxes) as the shingles themselves. Add some triangle supports made of foamcore and as the Brits say, Bob’s your uncle.  

I have found that it’s beneficial if I prep the shingles before I start the row. From left to right: one that has the left hand corner chopped, shingles that are cut in half, unmodified shingles and ones that have the right hand corner chopped.

You’ll need some of the half shingles to stagger the rows like this: 

I like to glue them on in a horizontal fashion. Putting the glue a little bit higher than it needs to be and dragging it down with each individual shingle. That way I can position each one as I like leaving 1mm to 1.5mm between each shingle but I have to work fast as I like Gorilla Wood Glue, and it sets up quick.

When it’s all glued together it looks like this:

Then after it’s painted:

There you go. Fantasy roofing 101. Now why don’t you go for it! Build something and show me what you got!

Townsfolk

These are the first eight townsfolk.

 

Jerauld Jonesy, barkeep and owner of The Quiet Woman.

Bethany Jonesy, serves lager and staff manager at The Quiet Woman.

Bridgett, serving girl at The Quiet Woman.

Porthos Broulet, Bretonnian and chef at The Quiet Woman.

Farmer Ted, one of the locals. He’s a farmer that works on a farm.

And lastly, a couple of local ne’er do wells.

Lawrence the footpad.

Carson the cutthroat.

Theodore, scroll caddy and one of the wizard Azogorim’s minions.

I didn’t get into their backgrounds and motivations in detail here. That will be left for the scenarios and for the player characters to find out!

Pilch Warpspittle

Pilch Warpspittle started life as an Elven prince. Spoiled rotten with every whim and desire catered to, his debauchery knew no bounds. His lifestyle should have pointed him into Slaanesh’s embrace but in an ironic twist of fate, Papa Nurgle blessed Pilch with an incredibly potent venereal disease. With his manhood (elfhood?) no longer working correctly, Pilch prayed to every god he could think of for relief. When he got to Nurgle, Father bellowed and his children chittered with laughter…

I have to admit that I wasn’t a big fan of this sculpt back in the day. I changed my mind over the last couple years as I’ve seen some very nicely painted versions online. This guy was very intense to paint as he is filled tons of tiny details and my eyes just aren’t what they used to be. Getting older is a bitch.

I did use him as an opportunity to experiment with a few things. The first is that I used some burnt sienna ink on the bone part. Next I played with color theory and mixed olive green with a purplish red to make a reddish brown for the shading on the cloak. I think it turned out well. Also used static grass for the first time.

Not sure yet if I’ll as a champion, warrior or give him some magic power befitting his pointing finger.

Thanks for checking in, see ya later.

Archaic Abodes 5

 Ok so I haven’t made a blog post in awhile...I’m really bad at this 🙄. I have noticed that many of the Oldhammer guys that used to have active blogs have been slowing down lately. I’m definitely not the only one who has noticed this. Oldhammer staple Golgfag has posted about this trend not only on his blog https://golgfags.blogspot.com/2017/12/is-oldhammer-dying.html?m=1 but also on the Oldhammer forum. http://forum.oldhammer.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=28019

One of the things that is probably drawing people away from blogs is the allure of social media. Facebook might be more convenient but it has way too much drama for me. While I may not be good at updating my own blog, I do plan on carrying the torch and doing my part to keep this kind of thing going. Drama free! 

All that being said, I don’t want it to sound like I’m getting a big head or putting myself on some sort of pedestal. I’m just some old school guy, doing his own thing and blogging about it. Really at this point, I’m probably just talking to myself anyway. I don’t have any followers and no one has commented on any of my posts. Whatever.

My buddy is making a table and I offered to help. He is on a deadline and was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. I took on some of the smaller, generic pieces. He didn’t assign me anything that would give away any plot points as it is a themed board built around a campaign and I’ll be a player character this time. The first two are bridges. He requested a stone one and a rickety type wood one.

I took influence for the stone bridge from the ones in Brian Ansell’s collection. http://realmofchaos80s.blogspot.com/2017/08/marcus-ansells-meritorious-posting-of.html?m=1

I used foam board, corrugated cardboard, card stock, sand, drywall compound, Mod Podge and craft paint. The balls on top of the pillars are beads I liberated from my daughter. I hope she doesn’t read this...I’m probably going to be in trouble!

I painted the road part grey at first and hated it. It looked weird. But on the flip side, I’m not totally sold on the brown. Six of one, half dozen of the other I guess.

To me at least it has a Dave Andrews feel to it. Nice and old school stylee.

The wood bridge has more of mid to late’90s GW feel to it with the skulls and spikes. My buddy’s board is undead/Halloween themed so it is fitting. He said it was perfect and better than he would have imagined. He’s happy, I’m happy.

Build with two different size craft sticks from the Dollar Tree, Gorilla wood glue, craft paint  and skulls and spears from Warlord Games plastic skelingtons box.

Not too bad for a bunch of crap glued together and painted. It looks bigger than the stone bridge but they are actually very close to the same size.

I also made some hedges. This time for my table that I haven’t built yet!

Made with green scrubby pads (once again from Dollar Tree) cut to the length of a craft stick. Approximately 110mm. Then cut into strips of 40mm. The strip was then folded over and hot glued together making a 20mm high hedge. This was then hot glued to a craft stick for a base. Sand was glued to the side of the craft stick to hide it. The green part was painted with wood glue mixed with a little brown paint. Then Blended Tuft green blend by JTT Scenery Products was applied when the glue was still wet. The sand was then painted brown. Baboom babam, done!

Once again, thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog. Be strange but don’t be a stranger!

Archaic Abodes 4

Welcome back to another episode of Archaic Abodes. The hopefully long running series of blog articles that I’m using to document my adventures in terrain building. I have grand plans for a town that includes townsfolk, buildings, walls, hedges, trees, and modular table tiles. But more on all that stuff later. 

Today I have, from Townscape building # 10. TALL HOUSE WITH VERANDA. 

I gave this one a blue roof to break up the monotony of terra-cotta that I had done on the first two Townscape houses.

I also experimented with a smaller base to see if I could crowd the houses together in tighter clumps. In hindsight I should have extended the base out the front a little more as this guy can get a bit top heavy with miniatures standing on the veranda.

As with all of my buildings so far it has a lift off roof. This time granting access to the second story.

The house was cut in half during construction to give access to the ground floor. There is a tab of foam board glued to the inside of each wall on the second story to lock it on to the first story. I didn’t get a picture of them this time but this little trick has work well enough that I will be using it again in the future. 

Those of you that know Townscape well will note that I added some extra borderlines around the exterior of the house. The top one is just for show but the bottom border hinds the seem between the first and second stories. Once again, it was something that worked well and will be used again in the future.

Thanks again for stopping by and checking out my blog. If you like what you see please leave a comment or even become a follower of my blog. 

Archaic Abodes 3

Another house from Townscape. This time number 9. House With Veranda.

It’s a pretty straight forward simple box design building. The added details to the doors, chimney, wood grain and weathering make it more than just a boring box.

Once again I did my lift off roof for getting the most out of the structure for game play. I also added an abbreviated second floor for access to the veranda.

In the future I’m going to add a ladder and fireplace to the interior.

Thanks for stopping by and checking out my adventures in small scale carpentry!