Monday, July 24, 2017

Made-for-scale terrain in 1/72

Obviously I've been on a bit of terrain kick lately. Most of the stuff I've been discussing lately isn't actually made for 1/72 scale, the preferred scale of this blog, but there are actually plenty of options native to the scale. Let's discuss them, starting with some plastic sets.

Imex has a lot of great detail sets, the Battlefield Accessories and Southwest/Alamo Accessories being particularly useful. Below are fences from the Battlefield set and a well (on the left) from the Alamo set.


The other well above is from Italeri's Desert Tents set. Italeri also has an Urban Accessories kit that is mostly modern but very useable for all kinds of games. Linear-B's civilian sets often come with accessories; their Roman Tavern has a lot of good stuff for fantasy gamers, taverns of course being common locations in such games.

Fountains from Italeri's Urban Accessories set.

There are many more options in metal and plastic. In 20mm scale, there's the metal Moveable Objects line from CP Models and the resin Blitz Bits line from Frontline Wargaming. Phersu Miniatures and Nikolai Modelling also have lines of resin 1/72 scale accessories. Baueda's line of "supplies" is billed as working for "15-28mm" scale, and since 1/72 falls in that range, I'm including them here!

I don't have any examples of these sets. They are unfortunately hard for me to come by, as they are not only fairly pricey, they are also all made in Europe and not sold in the same shops, so shipping would be crazy for me (though with the pound historically weak to the dollar, this might be the best time to go for it). If anyone gets ahold of these and can sell to me in a batch, drop me a line!

Monday, July 17, 2017

Crate work, everyone!

Hey, speaking of terrain:


Crates! These are a mix of Reaper Bones plastic and Rebel Miniatures resin. Painted up pretty quickly using something like the techniques described in this thread. I use mostly Delta Ceramcoat craft paints: here I did a base coat of Burnt Umber, then a heavy drybrush of Raw Sienna, lighter drybrushes of Straw and white, then another light drybrush with Raw Sienna again to balance the lighter colors. Then my standard "magic" black wash. Ecce, mirabiles!


Sven, who remember is about 1 inch tall, among the Reaper crates. These have a lot of great detail but somehow became noticeably warped. The leftmost crate is obviously askew here.


The Rebel Minis crates. These also have pretty good detail, and the resin of course isn't going to warp like the PVC plastic Bones are made of. Unfortunately, some bubbles must have formed when these were cast, leaving some rather bad pockmarks on some of these.

Despite these flaws, they look pretty good as a group.

Sven playing hide-and-seek.
I painted up a few more of the Reaper crates as cargo for my son's toy trains. Painting minis is tricky without a base to hold onto! I added an extra layer of Future Shine for added durability during play. They need a blast of Dullcoat, but it's been too hot for spraying.


And yes, my son painted those hopper cars himself!

P.S. I hope all my dear readers remember that I also have an RPG design blog, which isn't entirely moribund. I just started a series of posts on initiative checks, which will hopefully initiate more RPG blogging in the near future. Remember that the link to new posts can always be found in the sidebar.