A few items to keep busy...

With the lead pile as low as it is I have been working on some long neglected projects.

One very quick one was the completion of a rustic wooden bridge that has been sitting in the work table in an incomplete state for about nine months. This is intended to be a companion for the blockhouse that I made back in May. The pair were to be a part of a game that was to have been played at our annual  gaming weekend last year, but when that event was postponed due to the illness of our host I suspended work on it. Now that there is a possibility of that event occurring in May I thought I had better get on and finish it.

The construction was simple; the foundation timbers were made of twigs from the garden and the rest was made from match sticks. Painted various shades of brown it looks pretty effective to me. Below it is paired with the blockhouse, with the gun covering the bridge and its approaches.

The second project is one that will be probably be an ongoing one is the creation of some game markers. I have a bunch of these already made from some slotta bases that I bought decades ago – some I think when they first came out in the 1980s. I use these to record losses on units and there are six types: three round one, each with a number of 1,2 or 3 and three square ones with number of 4, 5 or 6. In my system the three round markers just record the accumulation of losses, whereas the square ones record losses and the collapse of the unit’s morale (whereby a 4 or 5 result shows the unit as disrupted and 6 as shaken).

The existing counters have been in use for a few years now and are beginning to show signs of wear and tear. I had been planning to make something a bit more robust for a while and have finally managed to get around to doing just that, starting with the round counters first. The first thing I did was make up three master patterns, taking some spare bases and making a small disk of green stuff into which I engraved a number 1, 2 or 3.

Then I made a mould (mold for my North American readers) of the master pattern using Blue Stuff. If you haven’t encountered this this stuff before this termoplastic is a super useful product for making push moulds. You simply place some of it in a container and pour boiling water on it. Inside 30 seconds the material is soft. You then take it out of the water (I like to quickly take any water off the surface with a paper towel) and then press it around your master pattern. You have about a minute to a minute and a half to work the stuff before it starts to cool and harden. I usually put it in the fridge for a while to really cool it down. The great thing is that if you get it wrong, and it is quite easy to trap air bubbles around the master, it is completely reusable – just throw it back into boiling water and reshape it.

With the moulds made I pressed some Sculpey polymer clay into them, cut the base level and then pushed the casting out on to some baking paper. This is my first time working with Sculpey and it is great – it is like working with plasticene. I then sculpted the surface detail – rocks, small plants, fallen logs, grass, etc. when I had completed six of each I fired up the oven to 130 degrees C and baked the clay and in half an hour I had 18 ceramic markers ready for painting.

After painting, coating with a strong polyurethane varnish (followed by a coat of matte varnish)  here are the final results.

I will try these out in some future games and see how they go for robustness. If they work out I can see a number of other markers and table accessories that could be similarly manufactured.

Also off the painting table are a few French and British casualty figures that came with the Perry heavy cavalry sets.