Dystopian Sea Table

Naval battles need a nice blue base to play on, the old table cloth was not really up to scratch. I saw a great tutorial on youtube on how to make a make an effective looking table in an afternoon (see the link at the bottom).

I started with two 16mm MDF 6" x 4" boards and painted them with a basecoat sealer. Then a nice blue solid cover, don't worry too much about the brush marks.

Next, with a few different blues and greens, sponge on a mottled effect all over the board. The paints I used were old house paints and sample posts I had collected.

Then with some white, sponge on some straight lines for wave tops. The final stages involves painting on some glass coat epoxy. It is a two part mix that I added a little blue dye to it. As it is drying pat it with some scrunched up paper towel to get a nice ripple wave effect. Leave it to dry for 24 hours for a rock hard finish.

The only downside of the table is it is hard to photograph because it is so shiny. But it's a nice surface to play on.  It will be covered later with green turf mats for the Napoleonic games.

Now to get the blue paint out of my hands.

Step by step pics after the read more link

Airbrush joining the team

Just bought an airbrush and compressor for undercoating 10mm figures. While the coloured spray undercoat in a can is great, sometimes it obscures the detail if it goes on too thick. It is also a bit limited in the colours. I can now get more variety in the browns of the horses and other uniform undercoats - green, blue, red. If I paint the dominant colour as an undercoat, the painting process is greatly speed up.

It was a cheap unbranded Chinese airbrush from ebay, and the compressor was almost new, off someone from a local forum. The airbrush is a double action, gravity fed one. 3 Different tips and needles - not the most expensive parts but enough to learn on. I can imagine I'll get a couple more brushes that I can swap, once I know what I am doing.

The compressor is reasonably quiet, my music can drown it out! And chugs along, easily keeping up with the spraying. it dances around a bit on the desk, I'll probably put it on the flor when I get a space set up for it. I think I'll need to make a booth to limit the overspray. And make a turntable out of scrap to make it easier to spray groups of figures.

I did some practice spraying on my Covenant of Antartica Dystopian War Fleet. A blue undercoat (not with the airbrush, but some left over primer) then airbrush white stripes on it. I picked out the weapons and pipes in silver, a bit of flouro green for the energy drive bits, then magic washed them for a finish. Not to bad for an evening's painting. A nice naval camouflage. I didn't want to spent too much time on this little diversion, I have hundreds of 10mms to get though yet.

The air brush will take some getting used to, but I can see its value already.

Dystopian Islands

Another small distraction. Some quick terrain for Dystopian Wars - islands and icebergs. I cut up some hard foam with the hot wire cutter I made. Undercoat with some house paint sample pots, two layers of drybrushing, a bit of flock and we're done.

Rough cuts with the hot wire cutter

Undercoating grey and brown

Icebergs in blue

Drybrush layer one

Drybrush on the icebergs

Finished islands with some flock

Finished icebergs

EOBS Squid going for lunch

Hunt for Megashark

Completely off topic, but I couldn't resist sharing. My son has gotten interested in Dystopian Wars from Spartan Games. They have some fantastic little 1/1200th scale steampunk models. So we got some and started painting them up. I read in the Spartan Games Forum about a Megashark scenario and thought I would have a go a making a Megashark. I found a plastic model of a shark in the toy shop and started some surgery.

Toy shark before surgery 

First I cut it into 4 pieces - the head, tail, fin and belly. I used these parts to make 4 different models - swimming, diving attacking and dead. I screwed the plastic pieces to 3mm MDF base and used some air drying clay to texture the base with some splashes and waves. I also needed a little body work to fill out some missing bits of the shark. A little paint and all done.

Cutting into 4 pieces - very careful with a bandsaw

4 parts used to make the different stages

After screwing the parts to the bases, I used some air drying clay to make the waves and other bits

The clay is molded to have a missing head, no idea how this happened!

Finished parts before painting

All finished

That's a lot of Sushi

So, a scenario idea - The Empire of the Blazing Sun is down in the Southern Ocean looking for some whales (for purely scientific reasons), when they notice something big on the radar. This is a lot of sushi coming they think. Little do they know that the Covenant of Antartica has been doing some interesting experiments with Element 270 and some "fish". One of their pets is out on trial and heading for the EOBS  fleet. The fight is on ... Maybe some lost Prussians could help the EOBS. Anyway some options for some fun games and a Sunday afternoon.

He is getting away

Oh $@#&!!!!!

Carve him up lads

I'll need to make up some stats for the Megashark.

Oh and the inspiration for the scenario is the "classic" film - "Megashark vs Crocasaurus". Not a particularly good film for action, plot or special effects. Gotta find a plastic crocodile now.

Ok enough fun for now, back to painting heavy calvary.