28mm Scots Greys

Alright, some more progress on the Crimean project, with some Scots Greys painted and based. 

These were nice figures in two parts (horse and legs cast separately from rider torso).

I have a bunch more British cavalry underway (lancers and dragoons).

Up next: Who knows?

Cheap-o space terrain

A few weeks back, I was doing some outer-space gaming and realized my printed planets looked a bit lame. Bruce suggested I get some styrofoam balls, cut them in half, and paint them up. 

For a $5 project, I think it turned out pretty good. The scale is a bit wonky and all but that is the nature of space (it is big) and my gaming table (it is small). I have bunch more balls to paint up so I may experiment with painting in a "night" side on the planets. I also needed some asteroids/small moons.

So I took some small balls and applied spray paint to melt them (outdoors, obvs). The resulting crater effect painted up well enough.

I wonder if a bunch of pea gravel laid on the mat in a drift would be more pleasing. Bruce suggested putting a piece of black felt underneath to denote the asteroid field's area.

I also melted a larger ball as a destroyed planet or proto-planet or whatever. Again, a super easy "nothing" project.

Up next: Ideally some Crimean cavalry.

Last of the Gotham buildings

And this is the last of the model train buildings I picked up in April (or March?). It is a small engineering firm with cool elements on the roof.

I spent a fair bit of time adding highlights and details to the buildings, but I'm not sure it really made any difference! I guess it is a bit dirtier and has better shadows and highlights than when it arrived.

Again, I picked this one up mainly because of the roof details adding visual interest (you spend a lot of time looking down on building roofs when gaming). 

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if this was small HO-scale or, indeed, was N-scale. In the end, I think it is HO (based on the doors), but is is small building and maybe is slightly under-scale. 

More Gotham buildings

I finished off another of the buildings I got at the model train swap. 

This is some kind of power station, I think. It came sans paint and with a bit of damage.

I primed and painted it in a drab scheme that fit the rest of the buildings I have.

Nothing fancy, but for $5 or $10, it was a good priced piece of terrain.

More Gotham buildings and trees

Happy Canada Day! Continuing on with the model train swap meet finds, one of my favourite HO-scale buildings is this one. It is just three-story walk-up apartment. You can build it a couple of ways and I was happy to find another one. The cost of the kit is nuts, so to get one for $10 already built was a deal.

This one needed paint and, more importantly, dark glass in the windows. No glass or clear glass creates an obviously hollow building which is visually jarring because you can see light through it (it lacks, weight if you get my meaning). Fitting glass into this building after the fact was a big hassle because of the way the interior is structured. There was much swearing.

In the end, it turned out alright and is suitably grimy for the residents of Gotham. I have three of these now and are each a bit different. One, bizarrely, has the fire escape on the front, where it conflicts with the entry way (honestly, model railroaders... did you even look at the instructions?).

I also picked up 10 cheap trees ($1 each) to add to my forest collection. I based these on wooden discs from the dollar store and each tree cost about $1.20.

These are not the best fir trees that I own, but they will do to fill out a forest scene. I have a couple of more industrial buildings to finish up repainting but they may be awhile.

Some new buildings for Gotham

Back in April, Bruce and I took in the spring model railway swap meet. bruce tree to talk me into buying a garden train but I declined, since there was no sleeper car and tat is where I would be living if I brought home a garden train. Anyhoo...

It was a much bigger swap meet than past years (maybe twice the number of tables) and I bought few new HO-scale buildings to add to my Gotham layout. I think I paid $15.

The best find was this building, which could be a bank or office buildings or swanky apartment complex. I drybrushed and washed it and clipped off the sidewalk. The result was very good for minimal effort.

It had an interesting roof (always a plus since we look down on models so much).

I added a small graffiti decal to the back. I'm not entirely sold on the royal blue trim but it would have been to much of a pain in the ass to paint it out.

A building that needed a lot more work was this one. The price was right thought (maybe $5?). Problems included a busted roof, no glass in the windows and no window frame on the back.

I peele the decal off and primed it black This I added a bunch of paint and a wash. I was able to fix one of the windows. 

The door and the other window I ended up covering with corrugated plastic card and some graffiti.

There wasn't much I could do about the back. I added in some glass but there was no way I was making that many window frames by hand. I boarded up the main floor windows like it was abandoned.

For $5, this was an interesting project and adds a seedier building to my layout. 

Crimean British Foot

I finished what I think is the last of the British foot from Foundry for the Crimea. There were two poses left: shooting and standing at attention.

These are nice enough figures--there were just a lot of them ad they had some fiddly bits.

I think this takes me to the dozens and dozens of mounted horse and the cannons. I might start with the horse and then, when my eyes begin bleeding, switch to the cannon for a bit.