Here be treasure!

 A trip to the seaside today resulted in the discovery of an ancient pirate map washed up in a bottle on the beach.  Number 1 son was most excited when he discovered it wedged under a rock (shortly after I had carefully planted it).

Ye olde treasure mappe.

 A trip up the nearby "Beeston Bump" took us to the Ordnance Survey Triangulation Point shown on the map.

Directions to the treasure.

 A check of the compass bearing showed us the direction to take.  Now, would that be 16 5-year-old paces or 16 grown-up pirate paces I wonder?

Taking the bearing.

A few pokes with a plastic beach spade swiftly uncovered undreamt-of riches...

The hoard.  Probably not "treasure trove".

What magnificent finds!

£2 worth of brass from charity shops.

From a junk shop for 20p.

Treasure chest 99p, 3 coins for 60p.

Less than £4 for the pirate hoard but well worth every penny for the excitement that resulted!  I always enjoy the process of hunting down props for things like this, you never know what interesting items you'll find.  The ship plaque was an especially fortuitous discovery for only £1.50, splendidly nautical for a piece of pirate treasure.  The map was fun to draw too.  I turned up the brightness on my tablet to full, then traced the outline and main geographical features in stages in pencil before going over it and adding detail using a range of waterproof drawing pens.  Some tea-bag antiquing (dried in the oven), burnt patches round the edges and carrying it round in a pocket for the day gave a reasonably aged look.

2020 Summer of Scenery - Part 3: Explosion markers

 Kaboom!  Who doesn't love some light-up explosion markers?

An AFCFA patrol comes under heavy fire from Commonwealth artillery.

 A very quick and easy project for a Sunday afternoon with Number 1 son.  Hot glue gun, tea-lights, black spray paint and a pair of pliers are the starting point for this.  Inspiration came from Black Magic Craft which has loads of great ideas and is well worth a look if you haven't already come across it.

Tools and materials.

The first task is to remove the plastic caps over the tea-light LEDs.  Number 1 son was pleased to get a go with the pliers for this part.

Removing the covers over the tea-light LEDs.

This should let the light from the LEDs fill the smoke cloud a little better.

Tea lights ready for glue.

Next, we need some polyester fibre stuffing.  I suddenly realised that I'd forgotten to get out this key ingredient but I knew we had a bag somewhere...

Don't forget the polyfibre!

We pulled off 4 good tufts of polyfibre of a suitable size for smoke clouds.

Smoke clouds.

Now the hot glue, the part to which Number 1 son had been most looking forward.  A circle of glue on the top...

Hot glue around the top of the tea-light.

... is followed by a wiggly line around the side.

More glue round the sides.

The polyfibre tufts are squidged onto the glue.  Once the glue has cooled and set, the smoke columns are gently shaped.

Don't look like much yet.

The next step was undertaken by just me, spraying the smoke black.  This particular brand of spray is especially pungent so best used outside.

Pffffft.... nice black oily smoke!

Once the paint had dried, I decided to add an extra spray coat of matt varnish to make them a little more resilient.

First coat of black paint done.

Altough not visible in these pictures, the flickering action of the tea-lights really adds to the effect of the explosions.

Kaboom!  Whump!  Kathoom! etc.

2020 Summer of Scenery - part 2b: Leaves

As a small addendum to my original post on leaves, I've noticed a few sellers on ebay offering "natural leaves".  Rather than paying £5 or more for a bag, these can be collected for free from the female catkins of Birch trees.  Silver Birch are particularly easy to identify with their lovely pale trunks.  The female catkins mature through late Summer and I collected these in early-mid August.

Silver Birch catkins.

I collected the catkins when they were still fairly compact and green, this makes them easier to handle.  If you pick them too late, they just disintegrate in your hands!

Crumbling the dry catkins.

After leaving them in the sun for a few days, they go brown and slightly fluffy looking.  Gently crumbling them between your fingers releases all the seeds (small and brown with ultra-thin "wings" on each side).

A spacer from within the catkin.

What we want are the little "spacers" that make up the structure of the catkin.  They're too large for 15mm but work pretty well for 28mm scale, if you squint a bit they look vaguely like sycamore or maple leaves, albeit with 3 lobes rather than 5.

A lone adventurer approaches the entrance...

They look good scattered in small numbers to add a bit of character to scenery.  You don't need many to give a good effect.

An ancient bronze statue.

Taking a few photographs gave me an excuse to get some of my dungeon out for a play.

The halfling isn't sure he wants to drink from the stagnant fountain.

Number 1 son hasn't seen my dungeon before so he was eager to put a few pieces together and get out lots of the smaller objects to dress the scenery, especially all my treasure piles!

You can never have too much treasure...

2020 Summer of Scenery - part 2a: Leaves

I used dried tea-leaves for leaf-litter in the woods I made for the local games club but I wasn't entirely happy with the result.  Following the foam shredding, Number 1 & Number 2 sons assisted with gathering a few nice dry leaves from the garden - mainly Hazel, Sycamore and Rose, all of which had a nice crisp crunchy texture.  There were plenty of lovely dry, crumbly Foxglove leaves too, but it would have been a bad idea to use them! Always think about the toxicity of anything your going to use in your scenery projects...

Materials - leaves!

Equipment used comprised assorted jugs (as purchased for the foam flock-making), some sieves and a tea-strainer, an old oven tin and a blander (also from the flock-making).
 

Equipment.

The leaves were blended to a fine texture by Number 1 son, a very satisfying process, if a little dusty.  (Number 2 son was absent for this stage - no way I'm letting a 1 year old loose with a blender!!)

Ready to blend!

The end result was sieved to remove all the larger pieces and bits of stalk etc.  Somewhere I have a finer sieve which I'll use at some point to grade the leaves.  At the moment they're quite large for 15mm, something akin to scale sycamore and the like.

Leaf litter.

I was initially disappointed that some of the leaf veins had come through the sieve but actually I think it looks OK on the ground - they give the appearance of small twigs and in-scale leaf stalks.

Leaf litter with undergrowth.

To store the leaf litter I have a handy plastic pot from Tesco that contained those little orange and lemon jelly slice cake decorations.  The label peeled off easily, the lid screws on firmly and I can instantly see exactly what's in it.  Ideal!

Useful storage container.

2020 Summer of Scenery - part 1: making foam flock

Number 1 son (5 yrs old) and I are embarking upon a terrain-making project over the summer holidays.  He's already given instructions on a small ruined building I've made but I've been watching some terrain making videos recently (specifically ones on making your own materials cheaply) and it's piqued his interest.

Inspired by various videos from the Terrain Tutor and Luke of Luke's APS, our first task is to make some flock clump foliage.  I've sourced the bits I need for this over the last couple of weeks. 

Materials and tools

Reconstituted chip foam off-cuts were free from a local furniture repair and re-upholstery centre.  Acrylic paint was £2 a tube from "The Works", PVA £11 from a local hardware shop (extra concentrated, better than the cheap stuff from Poundland), an assortment of jugs £4 in total from the local cheap "warehouse" shop plus a hand blender for £5 from Gumtree (local free-ads web site).  Not pictured - tube of black acrylic paint I already had, plus some old ice-cream tubs for storage of the finished product, free from the local ice cream shop.  Social distancing was maintained at all times during the collection of the aforementioned supplies!

Stage 1 was to tear the foam into 2-3cm chunks, add a splash of water and wring it through.  The hand blender was then used to shred it into a medium sized crumb.  The water apparently helps it shred more irregularly than dry foam and it will help draw the paint/PVA mix through in the next stage.

Something to add extra warmth to the basic green.

I decided that I'd add a drop of yellow to the paint mix too, I already have a large supply of Wilko tester pots from ainting my Hirst Arts dungeon scenery and this "Retro Ochre" seemed like just the job.

Paints and PVA ready to go.

I had approximately 500ml of shredded foam.  To this I added 10ml of PVA, 20ml of green paint, 5ml brown and 5ml of ochre.

Number 1 son undertaking the initial mixing.

Donning a blue glove (which always me think of Firefly - "Two by two, hands of blue"), the paint was squeezed and mixed through the shredded foam by Number 1 son.

After initial mix - not enough paint yet.

At this point I realised that I had only added half the amount of green I had meant to (should have been 40ml) which is why it looked rather pale!  Adding another 10-20ml of green produced a better result.

The end result!

The final result includes 4 different shades:

Basic green as described above.  This was then split and some variation added to form:

Lighter green (I added an extra 5ml of ochre)

Dark green (additional 5ml of black)

Very dark green (additional 5ml of black, 5ml of brown)

Basic green

Light green

Dark green

Dark brown/green

So what did I learn during this initial part of the project?

1. Upholstery / furniture repair shops can be very friendly and helpful
2. Very few places seem to use rubberised coir (coconut fibre) nowadays
   
3. A little foam goes a long way
4. Foam can be very tough.  I think I've broken the blender!  It got very hot and now the blades stop moving if a lump of foam gets in the way and it seems to have small parts rattling around inside the casing...
5. My 5 year old doesn't initially show interest but is keen to be involved once the work is underway
6. My garage needs a tidy up

What has been the total investment in terms of time and money?  Perhaps an hour or so sourcing the materials (a few minutes at a time taking small detours from other tasks to pick up the various bits), a couple of 'phone calls to obtain the foam, £5 for the blender, probably about 50 pence worth of the PVA and paint.  The remainder of the paint will certainly be used in other projects and I needed a new bottle of PVA anyway.  Time taken on the shredding/colouring of the foam was about half an hour.

Here's the end result with a 15mm figure for scale.

This will work well as clump foliage for bushes and trees but I'll need to run a bit of it through something like a coffee grinder or pepper mill to produce a finer flock for turf or highlighting trees.

AFCFA Reinforcements

My Armed Forced of the Charity Freedom Alliance line infantry are built up from GZG New Israelis but I wanted something similar but subtly different to represent an elite force within AFCFA.  These are Brigade Models Yenpalo, which fit the bill nicely.  They were previously available from Armies Army.

The pack includes 10 infantry: 6 riflemen, 2 support weapons, 2 leader-types and 2 with pistols and optional energy shields (which I will probably attach once I find where I've put them!).

Detail is good and they have a very good range of poses with some obviously firing, others advancing and I like the leader checking his watch!  All are wearing hardsuit armour and the guns are all of similar design, the support guns having a longer, heavier barrel.  Guns are not as detailed as some companies produce but still have a few features that drybrush well including sights etc.

After mounting on M8 washers, mine have been painted Humbrol 75 matt bronze green, washed with 50/50 Vallejo black in/Future floor polish with a Humbrol 86 matt light olive highlight.  Eyes are picked out in gold.  Weapons are matt black with Humbrol 32 matt dark grey drybrush to pick out the detail.  A fairly simple colour scheme but it matches my other AFCFA troops which is the main thing.

Overall, detail isn't as crisp as some other models (although I don't have any, the newer GZG New Israelis look like they have sharper detail and I might have used those instead if they'd come out sooner) but it's still very good.

I think I'd grade these a strong "B".