Monday, March 30, 2020

Blood&Plunder - Building a protected position for cannons

Manufacturer:     DIY
Scale:   28mm


Hi again! 

A friend of mine showed me the rules of Blood&Plunder a few weeks ago and as I like skirmish games it was no wonder that I started with these rules, too.

In times of Corona there is a lot of time at home and also for the hobby though I don´t take much use of this. Some days I am not inspired, some days I would like to finish all my projects. But that is the good thing concerning a hobby - you can do it at the time you like to and don´t have to....

As I am not really in the mood for painting figures at the moment (though I also do so) my favourite is to create terrain pieces.

And so this is the result of the last two days - a protected position for some pirates´cannons.

Just a few pictures of the ready piece of terrain and then some photos and description of the working process if you like to read further.

Hope you like it :)

Stay healthy.

Cheers
Mike






And here are some pictures of the working process.

First of all there is the idea how the piece of terrain should look like. Then there is the stadium of  racking your brain how to do it.

I used some pieces of styrofoam and also some of the stones I casted by using the molds of HirstArts and WoodlandScenics.
Though this is fun it is not as easy to arrange the parts so that they will fit in the way you want them to.

Sometimes a few difficulties appear that you have to solve. Here I needed to glue some cardboard to equal the different hights of two styrofoam pieces.

The shape of the hill was roughly done and I was able to start with glueing the rock pieces. 

Doing the wooden planks.

The result of the construction phase.


Next step was to fill the gaps with filler (Moltofill).

After filling the gaps and smoothing the filler.


I like the casted stones of HirstArts very much but I don´t like the gaps between them.
It doesn´t look very realistic.


I never tried this before though I have already done some terrain pieces with those stones. But this time I decided to fill the gaps with some filler.

At first I placed some filler on the stones and started to blend it into the gaps using a brush and some drops of water.

Not perfect but much better than before in my opinion.


After the filler was dry I started with painting the wooden planks and also the earth parts of the model.

This was also a new thing for me as I never tried this technique before. I started painting the stones by putting some washes on them - first a mixed wash of leather brown and yellow and then a darker brown wash.

After that it was totally covered with a thinner black wash.

After the washes had dried it was time for the first dry brushing of a darker gray.

There is not much to see from the brown washes but they still break through the gray. But my first thought was that I had ruined the model.

This opinion got better after the next two steps of dry brushing with lighter gray tones.

The model after the last dry brushing.
There are still some light brown layers on the rocks to see and this makes them look more natural than only using gray tones.
This was the last step only to be followed by putting the palm trees and the plants on the terrain.