Land Worth Fighting For

Even though the remodeling and cleanup are done, I still have not been able to set up a good place to paint so unfortunately I am yet to put brush to miniature this month. I am happy to report that I have nonetheless been painting since last Thursday as I am finally working on my Realm of Battle Gameboard, otherwise known as a car payment. So all that dithering about what theme to go with amounted to nothing really as I have opted to go with the standard pastoral look of green fields. Versatility won out over the more creative considerations as I now plan on having it replace my other two foam boards which would thus free up lots of space. Therefore I need this board to be usable across multiple game systems and settings, hence my decision to not do anything wild. Besides, they're called battlefields, right?

Agents of the Inquisition arrive to inspect my progress.

I painted the first panel of my board using the brown and ochre paints included in the Games Workshop scenery kit. I can already tell I'll run out of those colors long before I finish this project, not to mention a bunch of other paint pots. This thing really is a huge amount of plastic and just eats up paint as well as flock. I'm covering over most of the painted areas which now seems kind of silly to me, but the grassy look will have to do. I understand now why so many other people's boards that I've seen on the internet have been left completely bare other than the paint. I thought my test panel looked pretty good after just a basecoat and a couple of layers of drybrushing and thought about stopping there. Once I started painting the big blocks of stone I felt like I had committed myself to flocking so as to hide my total lack of transition between the dirt and stone. I'm sure, however, that I will be more than satisfied with my flocked board once I can put some sections together.

The first 2'x2' panel is finished.

Since most of the board will end up being covered in flock, which at the time of purchase I believed was more autumnal hued but oh well, the features left on it for personalization include a few large areas of stone, some cliff faces, and those infamous skull pits. I don't want to do anything so unusual or extreme as to distract from the overall pastural feel of the board and so I started by painting the stone with, appropriately enough, Dehneb Stone. It's a light, almost chalky colored grey and so my plan was to stain it using a variety of colorful washes, going from Gryphonne Sepia to Thraka Green, and then lastly Leviathan Purple. (Hmmm.... yellow, purple, and green. Does that mean my theme is Mardi Gras?) I'm pleased with how the stone areas turned out with the first one, though I have been going a bit heavier with the washes on my second panel. It started out as an accident as I forgot to thin the Gryphonne Sepia but I have since decided it won't look bad to have some variation here. That't what I'm telling myself, at least.

Apply wash then wipe off, repeat until satisfied or bored.

I am yet to deal with the cliff faces but will most likely give them the same treatment as the horizontal patches of stone, perhaps changing up the palette of washes slightly but otherwise painting them basically the same way. I am currently working on the second of the flat panels and therefore I'm now getting to deal with my first of the skull pits. I'm not doing anything fancy with the skulls themselves nor the stones around the pit, other than the same set of washes, but I do plan on filling the pits with resin to simulate water. I won't be doing that until the very last step of this project so I still have time to decide whether or not I want to tint the resin. I'm leaning toward not for the sake of simplicity, but I thought it might also be interesting to tint each one a different color for a more otherworldly effect. We'll see about that, but my laziness will probably win out. I'm leaving for a wedding at the end of this week so my goal is to be done with all the painting and flocking before I go, leaving the resin to be poured upon my return.

The Ideal Size

It had been some time since I had last looked at a table for wargaming prior to when I began working on my Realm of Battle gameboard two weeks ago. Once set up, I was surprised at how small it seemed. Now that I'm painting the pieces, my sense of the gameboard's scale has grown considerably. I am left however with the impression that my thinking about the ideal size for a game of 40k needs some adjustment to better suit the space I will have available.

In the past I have used mostly either 6' x 4' tables or 8' x 5' as well as the occasional smaller battle fought over a 4' square of bloody ground. It is pretty obvious with each new codex that the trend for army lists is to drop point costs for many units, allowing for larger armies for the same amount of points relative to their older cousins. I suspect that this might be why my new 6' x 4' gameboard didn't match up to my expectations after spending the last several months making army lists with the new books. That's the best explanation I've thought of so far, I don't know if it's right though. I just couldn't shake the feeling though that the board would feel too crowded with the armies I had in mind.

I've started to come around to the school of thought that favors 1500 point armies, though of course I really need to get some games in with the new edition before I can feel really confident about that. When I was last playing regularly it was usually with 1850 point armies and sometimes going up into the 2000 to 2500 point range. I'm starting to appreciate however the challenge of making the most out of smaller armies as it makes everything that much more valuable to one's overall performance. Although it can be fun to max out your Force Organization Chart, I think that this will be a rarer occurrence in the future as I think time and space will be a greater constraint for me than a limit of 3 Heavy Support choices. Considering how few games I've played in recent years, I hope that smaller armies could end up meaning more chances to actually play with them. Wouldn't that be nice?

Poised and Ready

Yesterday I finished undercoating the Realm of Battle gameboard, and it only took three cans of primer! But that gives me twenty four square feet of plastic ready for painting and that's pretty exciting. My problem now is that I don't know where I could paint them due to the size of the sections themselves. I think I've got a possible solution in the works, I just need to check on a few things before I can give it the green light. All things considered, I am happy to have this big albeit uncomplicated step out of the way. Also for the first time ever I have taken the extra precaution of washing all of the plastic in soapy watery to hopefully remove any remaining release-gunk from the manufacturing process. Although I haven't noticed any obvious benefit, the primer did adhere quite well and looks like I achieved an even coating.

Finally, I am one backpack away from having primed the first of my new Space Marines army. I'm going with Dark Angels and am going to really try to get into the painting as fast as I can. I have Dark Angels boxed army dating back to the release of their Codex several years ago and am going to be working mostly from what I got back then. I am however planning on using the normal Chapter Master rather than the limited edition one that came special with the boxed army as I would like to save it for sometime in the future. The one that is regularly available is cool enough and I reminds me of one of my old Dark Angels Captains that I painted close to two decades ago. That reminds me of another reason why doing a Dark Angels army has strong appeal to me. A long time ago, probably during the days of 2nd and early 3rd edition, I collected a mixed force of primarily Dark Angels with some Ultramarine allies. I therefore like the idea of returning to them after such a long absence... I might even be able to track down some of those ancient minis too! I don't know how well the paint job would look in comparison to the new ones, but it should at least still be intact; I remember that they had so much matte varnish on them that they looked wet. It wasn't intentional, but they certainly survived some rough encounters.

Home Alone

I know it's been a while since the last time I mentioned my plans for the Realm of Battle gameboard that I own. Well I finally have started work on it! I've been home alone with the baby for a few days and am taking advantage of this time to tackle this project. Since I still have this weekend plus most of Monday until my wife gets back home, I feel like this is a nice chunk of time that needs to be utilized for something worthwhile. It's a big project but not one so extensive, like painting an army or lately even just a single unit, and I therefore think I should be able to get most of it done, if not all. I will post updates over the next few days to report my progress.

Today I opened for the first time the black bag that came with the Realm of Battle and was impressed with the strength of the pieces, as well as the nice details scattered across the surface. I rinsed each of the sections, then rubbed the paintable surfaces with dish soap. Finally I sprayed them with a hose to wash away the soap and have been waiting since then for them to finish drying. I still hope tonight to begin undercoating the pieces, although I anticipate having to do most of this step tomorrow. Hopefully the baby will cooperate and allow me a few brakes to do some spray painting.

As nice as the Realm of Battle is, I am disappointed with has the difficulty of using the clips that snap the six 2'x2' sections together. They seem fidgety and I don't like the idea of having to mash the sections down in order to get them to grab hold. Maybe there's a better way to get them together and I just need more practice. I hope so since I have had a change of mind and now plan on flocking the board and do not want to leave hand impressions on the grass. I've decided that it is unrealistic to think that I will someday have two boards, which would allow me to have one for 40k and one for Fantasy. On the other hand it is quite likely that I'll be using the one board for both game systems and so I therefore have decided to go with the basic Grassy Plains paint scheme. I feel pretty good about this compromise and have started to rethink how I will get the rest of my terrain pieces to match this particular environment. I need to make sure that the board still conveys the feeling of being an alien world in a sci-fi setting. I think a couple of Imperial Bastions or some ruined buildings will go a long way towards placing the board in the 41st millennium. Any other suggestions will be much appreciated, thanks!

Lost in the Desert

A Realm of My Own

This past Christmas I was given by a very generous relative a Citadel Realm of Battle Gameboard. In the past for my playing area I've used all manner of surfaces and materials, but I have never been satisfied with the results and in particular with the compromises I felt forced to make in order to have something portable enough that it wouldn't completely consume my living or storage space. Hence my tables have always looked flat and plain. For years I looked with envy at the beautifully sculpted gaming tables featured in White Dwarf magazine, hoping for the day when I could have one like that as well. I am therefore very happy and grateful that GW has produced its own plastic modular gameboard as the Realm of Battle is both light weight and doesn't take up that much space, while still looking really good and being a functional gaming surface. The cost is no doubt prohibitive to many but for the value I think it is well worth its price. Considering how many gamers are able to collect multiple armies I do not think the current price is truly the outrage that has been portrayed in many online forums.

Now that I have my board I really want to start using it soon. But how do I want to paint it? Most of the gameboards I've used in the past have been fairly standard looking green-grass type of plains or steppes. Although it offers the convenience of being suitable for games of both Warhammer Fantasy and 40k, I'm a little tired of this style and am thus interested in trying out something of a different nature. Although using flock is great for blending the transition between the gameboard and any additional terrain pieces, it would also add a lot of extra time and work to the project as well, not to mention the added hassle cleaning up. I'm pretty sure then that it's time to leave behind the grassy farmlands for some new territory.

Thinking of it as being specifically for 40k opens up a myriad of options for the paint scheme, in fact a whole universe of options. A claustrophobic urban warzone or the spoiled Ash Wastes would be very thematic for 40k, or perhaps a blasted lunar surface or a menacing jungle Death World would offer a compelling environment for games. With each of these, as well as most of the others that I considered, I either didn’t like the color scheme or else it seemed like they would require more terrain than I want to put together or terrain that would be beyond my modeling skills. So with much consideration I am now leaning strongly towards painting my Realm of Battle as a Desert World.

It is for me very evocative backdrop with its wind swept hills and valleys, ghostly remains of human settlements, hazardous mining operations, and bizarre alien artifacts emerging from the sands. This obviously has a lot of appeal for me as it offers a strong setting for many types of science fiction narratives and would complement the look of many of the 40k armies in which I am interested. Getting this board painted would be fairly straight forward as I would mainly use a variety of browns and drybrushing, and thus I expect to be able to complete it fairly quickly. It would also look good with a wide variety of terrain pieces although I think GW's modular and game hills do not look good on it. But for 40k I think the hill sections sculpted onto the board itself should suffice as additional tall terrain is easily added with ruined buildings and the new Imperial Bastion kit. Possibly most important though is that I don’t think I’ll need too many more areas of terrain before I can start playing. I already have a number of Fantasy terrain pieces that I think can be made to fit into a futuristic setting and so I might start with just an extra couple of ruined buildings to better fix the setting.

And that’s how yet another project begins.