Dark Ages Cattle

OK, first things first. As far as we can establish, the cattle around in the Dark Ages in the British Isles were more like this:

 White Park Cattle. Note sexually dimorphic horns!

Than this:

Highland Cattle. A more modern breed!

These miniatures cost a princely five pounds for the five from Irregular Miniatures, at this year's Vapnartak show. Their stand is always worth having a root around over. There's all sorts of weird and wonderful things to be had that are great for adding colour and interest to the table.

Good starting material

As you can see, the general shape and form of the bodies is close enough to White Park cattle to be convincing, and the horn shapes, while not exactly right are actually pretty close for the cows (upturned) and easily convertible for oxen or bulls (forward pointing).

After a quick cleanup, tidy and fettle the models were ready for the minimal conversion needed. The flash, although it looks pretty bad, more or less fell off. With care, patience and a decent pair of pliers, I bent the horns on two of the animals to more closely match White Park cows. These two then got udders modelled with greenstuff. Well, with horns like that they aren't going to be maiden heifers, are they?

The other three had their horns bent so they point forward (where they are more useful in attacking head-on...). This was more tricky than for the cows but I managed it without having to rebuild any. Since these are oxen and not bulls, I didn't have to model any additional "equipment"...

Painting was simple: white undercoat / primer, followed by a coat of light grey into all hollows and dips. I drybrushed heavily with Vallejo deck tan (to blend the shading a bit) and then drybrushed with white. Finally I blocked in some highlights with more white. Ears (insides only!), noses, eyes, hooves and odd bits of the lower legs were painted black and the horns a pale greyish brown, with panzer grey on the tips. The udders on the cows were flesh tones, shaded and highlighted. Well, here they are - Dark Age burgers on the hoof. The Pictish horseman attempting to keep them going is from Newline Design for comparison. This side view gives a good idea of the build and form of the beasties.

Head 'em up! Move 'em out!

If plain black and white is a bit dull for you, there is another surviving strain, which has "red" (russet) ears. These would seem to be the subject of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, so how's that for a reference! The "red" genes are recessive and now only seen in isolated herds, exemplified by the Chillingham Castle cattle.

I based them on large washers to allow the beasties to be easily scattered across the table top. These would be ideal as booty in "raid" games, could serve as draft animals for the many carts that are now on the market or simply as a mobile hazard wandering randomly across the game table to make life hard for both sides! Like this...

Rollin' rollin' rollin'!

Pity the poor Pictish horseman trying to keep order among this lot!

Enjoy!

Blue Polystyrene Foam

Blue polystyrene foam - extruded foam, that is, is a bit of a holy grail for model making and terrain building. It isn't always easy to find, and can be expensive, but its properties make it the go-to material for some seriously good terrain builders.

I'm a newbie with the stuff. At the moment, I'm playing around, but I'm learning a lot as I do.

A bit of research and I had the plan for what a section of the sort of drystone wall I want to build would look like. I got my bit of blue foam and went at it with my ballpoint in the suggested style.

I found a couple of things. Firstly, using Gorilla Glue to stick the stuff to other substrates was a find for me. Secondly, the stuff seems to drink paint. It's like MDF with a raging thirst.

First off, I gave my wall a coat of gesso, followed by Vallejo stone grey, a sepia wash and some drybrushing. And the whole lot sank in and almost vanished! So, I gave the panel two coats of sand coloured craft acrylic, followed by the sepia wash. Even then, I was surprised by how much wash it needed. I'm using Daler-Rowney acrylic ink, with just a touch of flow improver, and it still needed two coats to get a decent depth of colour. I think next time I might try priming with thinned PVA, as per MDF, before showing it any paint.

If you haven't come across them, these acrylic inks are a revelation. I've been using Winsor and Newton shellac based inks for nearly thirty years for art and modelling, but these acrylic inks from people like Daler-Rowney and Liquitex allow you to do things I had thought impossible. The pigment loading is enormous and hence also the staining power - which was why the need to use two wash coats was a surprise.

Finally, repeated drybrushings with shades of the base colour, grey, off-white and ochre as per normal to bring out a sense of depth and texture.

Well, here's the result. The panel is 40x35mm, so this is larger than life-size. This follows roughly the size of the drystone areas between the timber framings on the post-Roman rampart at South Cadbury.

First bit of blue foam!

 After a closer inspection of the reference photos, I realised that the size of the stone, except perhaps in the very bottom course, is much too small. Below is a scan from Lesley Alcock's "By South Cadbury That Is Camelot", plate 81. You can see what I mean!

Buy the book! It's indispensible!

Notice the wall, compared to mine, is made of biggish stones (the rods are 1m), laid in courses on top of VERY big stones. Oh well, always next time. Ironically it will be quicker and easier to make the panels representing big stones!

Still, that's an authenticity problem, not a technical issue, and I'm sure the panel in question will "come in handy for something" as my late father would have said. I intend to be using this stuff quite a lot. As I live and learn I'll post a few things with ideas, experiences and hints that hopefully will be useful.

Enjoy!

Vapnartak 2013

Spent Sunday at York Racecourse enjoying Vapnartak 2013.

I arrived at about 10:30, had to queue to get in, and found it was absolutely heaving! It continued to get more and more crowded until about 13:00 when it started to thin out a bit. It felt much busier than last year, when heavy snow the night before impacted on both visitors and traders, and this was confirmed by a colleague who is a member of the club. Nearly 1400 people came through the doors! The organisers had gone out of their way to guide visitors coming by car into the drier sections of the carpark, which is notorious for ending up looking like Paschendale and being nearly as easy to get in and out of! Much appreciated.

Traders included the usual suspects (Gripping Beast, Caliver Books, Dave Thomas etc) and some new faces to me at least, such as Minibits, Warbases, Treemendus and Sarissa Precision.

 I was parted from my money for Gripping Beast Picts and Saxons, Crusader Scots spearmen, model trees from Minibits, terrain consumables (flock, texture and building bits) from Warbases and Treemendus, steel paper from Coritani and a copy of Dux Bellorum.

My only "fail" was trying to get a scale cattle or even buffalo skull to make up a Pictish standard, but while searching I found a set of cattle models from Irregular Miniatures (always worth a rummage around their stall!), which will be super-handy for raiding scenarios and were superb value for money.

One noticeable thing was the increase in companies making and selling laser cut MDF buildings, terrain and accessories. Obviously, as a dyed in the wool scratchbuilder of terrain I have to register a conflict of interest with this sort of thing. To my eye, the range and quality seems to be ever-increasing. There were buildings from all eras and genres, useful (and hard to make!) general accessories like ladders, and wonderful accent pieces like carts and sheds. To anyone lacking the time or confidence to make their own, there are some superb products around at, in most cases, quite reasonable prices.

The Impetus tournament was a treat to watch, with superb armies. I'm not qualified to comment on the WH40K stuff, but as usual it looks great and is a treat to the eye.

Something I hadn't seen before was the Malifaux tournament. I have been periferally aware of the game and the minis, but this was the first time I had seen it in the flesh. The players were having a high old time, so from that point of view it looks like a great success, and visually its a real attention grabber with the superb miniatures and bright pictures on the cards used to drive play. My impression had been that the production values for the game were very high and in the flesh this is confirmed.

The demonstration and participation games were of an extremely high standard I thought. I tried to get some photos with my phone but the pictures I got were so monumentally bloody awful I can't bring myself to post them.

The League of Extraordinary Kreigspielers' Back of Beyond game in Tibet was a real eye catcher, and all involved seemed to be having great fun, while North Hull Wargamers  early WW2 game came complete with heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe! The Lance and Longbow Society were putting on a fantastic, colourful battle with hordes of beautifully painted minis. York Wargames Society were of course represented. Their Pegasus Bridge participation game didn't seem to ever lack people wanting to have a go. A superb standard of figures and terrain here. Finally, Darren from Gripping Beast, guiding people through a 4 point Saga game played comfortably in an area 2 feet by four feet. After the way this was catching peoples' enthusiasm if they took any copies of Saga home with them I'd be surprised.

Progress, of a sort...

Well, let's put it this way. I now have quite a lot of Pictish skirmishers, and an increasing number of cavalry. I can whizz round the battlefield and shoot arrows and javelins at people I don't like, but the army is a bit lacking in core units! I'm hoping to start addressing this at the weekend.

It's the Vapnartak show at York racecourse this Sunday, which has been great fun in past years and I hope this year will be no exception. The chaps at Gripping Beast are bringing me along a bunch of Pictish minis and I'm hoping to pick up some Crusader armoured Scots, which together will form the hard core of the army.

I'm working on the post-Roman fortress walls I threatened to start on in an earlier post. I've spent some time converting the drawings and photographs in Leslie Alcock's various books into a set of dimensions and some plans and sections to scale the build from. I have acquired a supply of extruded blue polystyrene foam to use for the drystone walls.

This bit of the build was a head-scratch moment. As you know more or less all my terrain is built out of waste polyethylene foam, cut to shape and covered. It's nice easy stuff to work with but it isn't something you can easily engrave stonework into, and the idea of applying plaster and hand-engraving was more than I could face.

I had more or less settled on either using extruded polystyrene or else casting the drystone panels in casting plaster. The latter didn't really appeal. If there's one thing about drystone walling it's that it definitely doesn't follow a pattern, and even if I made up two or three moulds this repeating panel would start to be a bit obvious. Making the whole thing from extruded foam appeared to be eye-wateringly expensive, so I wondered about applique-ing drystone panels made from thin polystyrene between the timber uprights?  Genius! Just one thing... How do you glue polystyrene to polyethylene without it falling to pieces at a touch or melting the PS?

I tried a few things: stock PVA, wallpaper overlap adhesive, epoxy, solventless builder's glue, none of which actually worked. Then I tried this stuff: Gorilla Glue! I normally use this for mending furniture, but I decided to have a punt. I applied a very thin layer to the PS first, and was pleased to see it didn't melt! I dampened the PE foam slightly, then put then together. Before applying anything, I had lightly scored the joining faces of both substrates with a scalpel, to allow a bit of penetration. Two hours later and no power on earth will get them apart!

The stuff isn't cheap, but its far more economical than using epoxy or cyanoacrylate on those sort of areas.

Enjoy!

How NOT to strip miniatures...

I was almost tempted to put in a new label, "how not to" for this post.

I had a bunch of Newline Designs Pictish cavalry. I had converted and painted these when I first got back into gaming, and had based them for DBA. Well, no one was playing DBA in 28mm, so hence the other army types. The painting was ropey even by my generous standards, so I decided a clean and spruce up would be in order.

Now these had been varnished with about three layers of polyurethane, one gloss and two matt, over acrylics and a car paint primer. Hence, the usual trick of kitchen power spray was about as effective as spitting at them. So I went up to using pine disinfectant. After five days of soaking they were merely a bit discoloured and the paint was still as solid as a rock.

From here I went to what I thought was gross brutality. Dichloromethane...

Dichloromethane is the active ingredient in Nitromors paint stripper and can usually be relied upon to take more or less any coating off more or less any surface (provided it doesn't simply dissolve everything!). It's also a "go to" solvent in the laboratory for extracting tightly bound analytes from tough samples. So, on these two grounds, I had high hopes of success.

Three days in DCM including a gentle poke with a brass brush, and... NOTHING! OK, not quite nothing. Here and there were signs of things softening a bit, and some colour had leached into the solvent, but you could barely see the effect.

So I decided to take a leaf from Marsellus Wallace and "...get medieval..." on them. I allowed the residual solvent to evaporate and put the figures in a pot of dilute caustic soda.

Now that worked. A bit too well, hence the title. It removed all the paint. Every trace. In one fell swoop.

When I rinsed the residue away, I found to my horror that it had also softened and debonded all the green stuff I had added to model armour, helmets, facial hair, weapons and so on, and had used to cover the cut and pinned joints where I had reposed both horses and riders!

And it had weakened and destroyed the epoxy and cyanoacrylate I had used to hold the pinned parts together in the first place!

This lot got taken to the cleaners! Arrows show (some) places where green stuff came away.

Luckily I have managed to keep the relevant parts together to re-create the figures. Oh well!

My wife has a blog too!

Fair warning, it has nothing what so ever to do with the sort of thing you might find here, but go and have a look at my wife's brand new blog at:

Janet Kelly Crafts

I am constantly in awe of her skills. I think you will be, too.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year - The Shape of Things to Come

A very happy new year to all of you!

Just to kick off as I mean to go on, I thought I'd get a post in early.

A small foretaste. My Pictish army will include a fairly large mounted element. I have managed to get ONE done (they stalled a bit in the face of other things), and here he is.

Keep up lads!

All the minis here are from Newline Design. The rider is a minor conversion, in that he had the spear arm re-positioned and a helm modeled with green stuff.

A roughly double move (depending on the era, the move is more or less) compared to infantry, and in the case of the AoA list, free of the problems of warband status, these men can race round the battlefield and wear down the slow, slogging Saxons, wild Norse or lumbering Sub-Romans!

Enjoy!