Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Trees

Picked up a package of Christmas trees from my local Fleet Farm the other day.  Wasn't really interested in snow covered trees to I took a bit of hot glue and some paint and made some modifications to them.  I ended up with a few Birch trees a couple generic trees and finally a few flowering trees.  All in all I was pretty happy with how they turned out.




Some pre-painted peices

Thought I would show you a few pieces I picked up off Ebay from DungeonMaster Mark.  Really some great stuff and I'm really looking forward to using them in my game!



As I said, it's all really great, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the smaller boats followed by either the mine tracks or the beds.

Swamp Village

Here is my latest project.  I actually finished it a few weeks ago but just finally got around to posting on it.  It is a swamp village for our new campaign.  This is our parties starting out location and an area we will probably spend at least a bit of time with starting out.  Thanks again to GM Scotty for the how-to's.







And Finally a few photos of them in action.  the mat is actually some cloth I picked up at Joann fabrics with a 50% off coupon.  Go Coupons!




Friday, October 3, 2014

Kickstarter Mini Arrivals!

I pledged a Pre-painted Mini kickstarter a bit over a year ago and the mini's arrived yesterday.  In one word they are fantastic.  My favorite by far is the Kraken, of which I got three.  My next favorite are the Botanimoth's of which I got 5.  For the kickstarter they offered 2 different paints of all the mini's and so I made sure to get at least one of each in each paint style.  The company that produced the minis is called Dungeon Crawler and you can pick up the mini's on their website.  If you are interested in the kickstarter, even though it's long over, you can find it here: Dungeon Crawler, Fantasy Miniatures.  Anyway, on to the photos!










Here is my latest project.  I saw a video post somewhere about making terrain maps using a cloth canvas from a home improvement store and then spreading caulk on it for terrain features.  The first attempt was a bust.  I could have sworn the video I watched said to use silicone caulk and so my first attempt was using that.  In addition to it being about the most noxious smelling stuff I have ever used (even though I was in a well ventilated room, by the time I was done I felt sick from the fumes for about 12 hours afterwards) once dry, I also discovered that paint won't stick to it.  Into the trash it went after my daughter walked across it and left footprints where ever she stepped.  I vowed never to try that again.

So I week passes and I decide to try it again, this time using paintable acrylic caulk.  It actually went pretty smoothly the second time.  The only problem I ran into is using caulk to create ridges and such means it goes on fairly thick in places, and it takes a long time to dry completely through.  I had it done and painted 2 days before the game, and while it was certainly dry to the touch, it was still a bit mushy in places when you placed a heavy object on any of the ridges.   Rolling it up to take it to the game ended up putting a few cracks in the caulk (nothing I can't fix later with a bit of paint), but if I were to do it again, I would want at least a week or two to let it dry before using it.  Anyway, here are a few photos.  One of it plain, and then several in use.

Hope you enjoy.





The last picture is of my first attempt.  You can see where my daughter walked across it and took the paint off.


Sorry for the ok quality photos.  Since upgrading to iOS 8 on my iPhone it's been taking really crappy pictures.