Mountain's Men

I continue to be amazed at the Song of Ice and Fire miniatures, and what you can do with them!

When you consider that they are basically unbreakable gaming minis, having this much fun painting them just seems impossible.  Since the armor is sculpted in a more realistic fashion, you end up with cleaner, smoother lines.  This makes executing Non Metallic Metals much easier..

I didn't want the Mountain's Men to have as much of a shiny look as I did on the Lannister Halberds, which meant introducing more purples and greens into the mid tones of the metals.  As you have heard me discuss many times in my articles and painting videos, purple and green mixed together make a wonderful set of grays.

When those are separated, and placed next to each other, they still register to the eye as a gray, since the eye "blends" them together.

This was an initial color test miniature for an upcoming video tutorial series for the Patrons.  I will be taking on the Mountain's Men unit as part of the Army Painter series on my Patreon Page.  Here's a link to the page:  www.patreon.com/JamesWappel

The Great Wappelville Baking Show!

On the day of our Anniversary, it is time to show another annual tradition in Wappelville, and that is making the Christmas cookies!!

It took on an added dimension after catching the Great British Baking Show... and it all begins with making the doughs...

With the Gingerbread and Nutmeg cookies baked and cooling, it was time to make the all important frosting!

To make her Peanut butter Blossoms, Cathy unwraps lots of Hershey kisses...

On to the frosting!  It is hard to believe that most of these food colorings were used for the fondant frosting of our wedding cake.

Cathy discovered some new candy decorations for the cookies in various colors, so I was looking forward to trying them out!

All the colors are now in bags, and it is time to decorate those cookies.

Here we have the first few trays, including the Christmas Shark.  Those new candy bits proved to be just as helpful as we thought, and opened up a lot of new options for decorating.

It just would not be Christmas without trains... all aboard the Wappelville Express!

It wouldn't be a happy Holiday without a few tanks and soldiers.  And some Goblin helpers for Santa!

Holiday Spirit really soars with the Dauntless SBD and the Demon Angel.

Trunko, Jeero and the rest of the stuffed animals would be very disappointed if we did not have a few cookies to represent them!

Yup, we made a few cookies.

Just a few.  I think it was about 11 pm by the time we were done.

Sherman is delirious to see his own cookie!  Don't eat that now...

So it is time to say Merry Christmas, and wish a Happy Anniversary to my wife Cathy.  We have been on the miniatures painting journey from the very beginning, and it has been a great sleigh ride!  I love you very much!

Interior Decor!

Here's a quick follow up episode to the Nouvion board series.  While it is not the step by step that I will be making in the future, it will still be useful!

I had hoped to make the interiors of the buildings look more 'lived in' as opposed to the usual blank wall interiors.  In the past I had printed out wallpapers for MDF buildings for our Wild West table, and I thought it would be just as nice for Bolt Action...

This meant doing a LOT of Google image searches, and then some work in Photoshop.  I measured out the floors of my buildings, and then patched together strips of the wallpaper which could be printed out.

You can see the small posters which take up the unused space on the page.  These were meant to be general advertisements, specific signage on various stores, and even propaganda posters.

Some patterns were more easily spliced than others.  I think I did six different types of wallpapers.  I also continued my sign/poster collection!

Each of these strips matches the height of my individual floors, so all I have to do it cut out the windows, doors, etc.

These were printed on printer paper which is also has an adhesive backing.  Basically, each 8.5 x 11 sheet is a gigantic sticker!  I have noticed that it is still a good idea to hit the surface where you are placing the paper with a glue stick in the corners for extra adhesion.  

You will be seeing these wallpapers and posters in a few new video battle reports in January, so stay tuned to the YouTube channel and subscribe!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LgWEoymVQw

Raise your Sword

This Stark Outrider has a slight conversion to it... that is altering the angle of the sword arm.  In this case, I am still using the alternate color scheme to give them more of a historical look.

All of the Non Metallic Metals were still done in the same way as the previous sets of Stark infantry.  They were meant to have a shine, but not the same sort of Sky Earth Non Metallic Metals as the Lannister unit that was featured in my latest Army Painting series on the patreon page.  Here's a look back at that unit: https://wappellious.blogspot.com/2018/12/shiny-lannisters.html

As I have mentioned before, I will be featuring the Stark army in the "official" color scheme when I create the how to videos for the Patreon Page.  I will be creating videos for the units and the individual characters/NCU's as well.

Each of the series is usually 10-13 hours of tutorials, which take you from prepping and basing the entire unit all the way through the painting process!  You can check that out here:  www.patreon.com/JamesWappel

Building Nouvion: Part 2

More images of the Nouvion terrain board which I have been working on to continue my France 1940 series of battle reports.

In case you have not already seen the articles on how the buildings were created, I have a number of previous episodes:

https://wappellious.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-town-in-ruins.html

In the last episode, I talked about the 1/48 scale furniture and what that added to the scenery, as well as the scatter bricks made from the Das modeling clay.

I also made these sandbag emplacements out of that clay, and they have proven to be even sturdier than expected!

The idea was to make sandbag emplacements that could cover any of my weapon teams, and even a squad of 10 infantry!

Here come the reinforcements for the next battle!

I will have to find ways to make mailboxes and other small street items.

The 75mm gun also fit behind the sandbags, as did the heavier 105mm.

As I look at the images of the streets, I definitely want to make some destroyed tanks... along the lines of these scratch sculpted objective marker/terrain pieces:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2GrlbpDT0o

The Citroen car in this image was part of a 1/48 scale airplane kit... perhaps I will get lucky and find some more!

All of my previous video reports have taken place in forests and hills, so this urban environment will be quite different!  Here's a link to one of those earlier reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78AWDqiSgH4

The higher sight lines of these buildings will offer some interesting sighting angles, and there will be a LOT of blind alleys.

I also look forward to seeing what difference the roads will make, and the use of barricades to cut them off!  At this point, I am still trying to compile the equipment needed to make tutorial videos on my terrain.

As I have mentioned in other articles, some of the equipment has been acquired.  However, the more costly items remain, which is one of the reasons I have the Patreon Page.  A much larger filming area is required, as these terrain pieces are pretty big!

There are already a lot of painting tutorials available on the page, including the Army Painting series on the winter Soviets!  You can check that out here:  www.patreon.com/JamesWappel

Building Nouvion: Part 1

I have been continuing to work on the latest terrain board for my Bolt Action battle reports... attempting to create the town of Nouvion!

Here's a link to the original post on the construction of the town: https://wappellious.blogspot.com/2017/10/heading-into-town.html

As I mentioned in the link, this table is built around the TableWar cobblestone town mat.  In the article, I talk about how I have been trying to build to the design of the mat itself, as opposed to simply plopping a bunch of scatter terrain around.

I am trying to create some interesting viewpoints, multiple levels of combat, line of sight blocking, hard cover, blind alleys and so on.  This goes as far as attempting to match the cobblestone around the edges of the buildings!

Over the last few years, I have been studying all kinds of terrain that has an urban feel to it.  This can be a little more tricky than the natural forest style boards, as it needs even more scatter terrain.

Also, having those ruins look a little more realistic has been an obsession.  One aspect of working on my Monte Cassino display board involved a large amount of rubble.

I wanted to be able to "extend" the broken brick rubble piles beyond the buildings and the initial "base" as you see in this image.

However, I knew that having a lot of loose bricks all over the place would mean extra work cleaning things up, not to mention the labor in making them all!  Fortunately I learned about Das Modeling clay, which is a very sturdy, inexpensive air drying clay which turned out to be very handy for making a LOT of bricks in a hurry.

I will try to do more of a step by step article on that for you later.

It was a little frustrating to learn about my misspelling on the Butcher's shop sign, but I was still happy about the building, the posters, etc!

Here we see the scatter bricks, extending out beyond the buildings.  This provides a little more rational appearance to the broken walls, and something which will play off the city fight rules in Bolt Action.

I know there is a table for rubble, and I definitely wanted to include them.  When I start to work on the more urban tables like Stalingrad, Budapest and Berlin, I will have immense piles of masonry around.  Not just individual scatter bricks, but actual pieces of terrain which look like troops have dug out some of the bricks to create a gun emplacement, etc.

An overview of the buildings, which was very satisfying!  Things are starting to come together!

I have a lot of signage to do on the buildings in the central square, as well as other weathering effects, windows, and more posters!

I think it might be fun to have a new more of these cars, and perhaps some trucks as well.  Might have to scratch build those.

At least I won't have to scratch build any furniture!  I discovered some very inexpensive 1/48 scale furniture on Amazon.  I eagerly awaited to see how they might look in my buildings...

I have some of the interiors finished on my intact buildings, complete with wallpaper!

This was a very cool result... and it made me really happy I had gone through the effort of creating the wallpaper.  I will also try to create a step by step blog post around my process for making the interiors.

The furniture certainly adds a lot.  It was very cheap, very sturdy, and it can simply be removed if I feel like it is in the way of a weapon team or squad that takes shelter in that building

If you want to check out the last episode of my battle report series that will lead up to the engagements on this table, here's a link to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LgWEoymVQw