Yearly Archives: 2014

More Fast Scenery – Confrontation Walls, DUST Dragon’s Teeth

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Continuing the drive I’ve been on in knocking over fast-ish scenery projects recently, here’s a couple more things I’ve completed in the past week or so.

First up are some stone walls from the Confrontation starter set – which is also the place that the recent Hill Ruins came from. This time, I remembered to add a figure for scale. I like these walls a lot. They’re just the thing (along with the hill) that whoever owns the current rights to should be churning out en masse as cheap and great-looking scenery in hard plastic.

Because I’ve got two starter sets, I’ve ended up with 4 of each piece (the set comes with 2 of each piece, plus the hill, figures, dice, tape measure, rules, etc. Just the usual as far as painting goes on these – base coat, drybrush, wash, drybrush again, weathering powders.

Small Confrontation walls, with Elf for Scale.

Large Confrontation walls, with Elf still for scale.

Confrontation walls again, alongside Italieri Fountain

When I first showed off the Italieri fountain, awhile back, I got asked quite a reasonable question about scale. So this time I’m showing the figure to demonstrate both the scale, and also how well these ruined wall sections fit in with other scenery to create a space that could fit in anywhere from a Fantasy world to WWII to the 41st Millennium. Take away the fountain and the walls will work just as perfectly in an Ancients setting.

Confrontation walls combine nicely to make a ruined building. Call Time Team!

 

I also started and finished a second batch of 6 Dragon’s Teeth/Tank Traps from DUST Tactics sets. I started with 6 of them, from various starter sets and so forth, painted them at least a year ago, then they sat around. In the last year or so, I’ve discovered another 6 of them, gleaned from various DUST expansion sets, and so the lot of them sat around taking up space in my painting area, until last week when I finally pulled my fist out and painted the new ones. Which predictably took just a couple of hours in a day that I was also busy doing all sorts of other things in. So – probably not worth the delay in getting ’round to them, then.

DUST Dragon’s Teeth Tank Traps

Nothing amazing. Painted with a base of Woodland Scenics’ Concrete, then some washes, drybrushing and Tamiya weathering stuff. They look decent and suitably grubby with a realistic enough look on the table top.

DUST Dragon’s Teeth – Area Denial!

With 12 of them now finished, there’s enough of them to provide a fair bit of Area Denial to enemy armour. Again, suitable for battlefields anywhere from WWII through to the far future. Though I have admittedly just realised that there’s no scale shot with a vehicle for size context. I’ll get that sorted shortly.

 

 

 

Melbourne Museum Rocks! Objective Markers and Summoning Portals

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So today Marouda and I took my Mum to the Melbourne Museum. We all still refer to it as the “new” Museum, even though the new facility was opened back in 2000. The old Museum, located in what is now entirely the State Library of Victoria was a lot better, as they had much more of their collection on permanent exhibition, while the “new” Museum only has things like Arms and Armour on display when there’s a “thematic reason” to include them in some other form of exhibit. So, basically, never. (Yes, seriously).

Anyway, it was still a decent day – seeing dinosaur bones again, even cast ones is always good. But since this isn’t Facebook or Twitter to be filled with meaningless babble, there’s a point to all of this. After the visit, we took a look through the gift shop, not really planning to purchase anything. We’ve gotten some fossils from there before, but this time, I spotted various Orthoceras for sale, including these little polished ones with the same footprint as a coin. I decided that they would make just about the coolest objective markers ever – after all, they’re actual bloody fossils!

So I bought some.

Orthoceras for Objective Markers. Elf for scale.

Undead and Elves pretend to contest the fossilised Orthoceras objective in simulated game photograph.

I’m sure I’ll also sometimes use specific modelled objective markers for thematic reasons, but regardless, these are incredibly cool, and work well on a number of levels.

Speaking of cool, I also spotted these:

Agate Slices – available in a variety of colours – $15 each, sure. But that’s still probably cheaper than whatever crappy plastic summoning portals or vortex templates that GW or PP et al are selling. My first thought was actually Dark Eldar, but they’ll work for anything as far as I can see.

The Mouth of Sauron summons bad things from the Pink Agate portal. And provides scale.

Now summoning from the Blue Agate portal!

And finally, from the Purple Agate portal!

These Agates played havoc with the auto-white balance on the cheap digital camera that I use, as you can plainly see (check the desert sand mat!). Regardless, and despite the slight tonal shift and the fact that you’re not getting the 100% true colour of these Agates, the point is that they look bloody amazing, and despite the fact that I’ll likely use them rarely, they’ll also double as a nice little bit of deco for the War Room – and when I need a magical or psychic portal for a wargame or RPG, I’ll have the most kick-arse ones you’ve ever seen. They’re beautiful, have depth and layers, and incredibly deep colours. Oh, and as you can see – they look the part amazingly! It might be worth giving them a coat of clear acrylic to protect them, which I’ll look into later on.