Modern City Boards, Here I Come!

Hi All!  Time for a quick update in what could possibly be the most boring post in the history of blogging!  You have been warned!

  You'll probably remember that I've spent the last couple of weeks gearing up for both the launch of Blood Eagle and Zombie Golf.  Whilst the former meant the scratch building of a lot of scenery as well as painting some miniatures, the latter was more a case of painting some Zeds and converting a baseball bat to a golf club.  It was great to be able to work on two very different games, and to be motivated to get on with painting my miniatures rather than procrastinating over what to paint next.

This sorry state of affairs has been caused by a successful summer of painting minis for our upcoming games last year, hampered by the lack of subsequent time since then to concentrate on making the scenery for the aforementioned little men to battle across.  All my spare time went on the buildings, and every time I thought about painting a mini, I just couldn't settle on what to do.  Well, no more!  I'm highly motivated once again!  And it's the summer!  So I have time on my hands!

 So with both games up and running, and some more monks for Blood Eagle on my paint station, my scenery building can move on to my next major project: Modern City Boards.  And, to be more specific, pavements.  Lots of pavements.  A whole heap of the things, to be honest. Take a look if you don't believe me:

 Yup.  That's a lot of pavement sections.  These are produced by the excellent good folks at TT Combat.  And yes, I'm keeping them loose to increase exponentially the number of possible layouts I can make with them.  You can read all about the back story on this project and my reason for taking this approach here and here. I have here three of their pavement packs.

 I must give a shout out to my wonderful wife who puts up with all this madness.  She's even allowed me to monopolize about four fifths of our dining table while I work on the pavement sections.  And that's with the extension added in!  It's quite surreal to have over 6 feet of hobby all in one place.  Especially when it goes from the Dark Ages to the modern day!

And here's where my warning at the top of the post comes into full effect, because painting dark grey pavement sections a lighter shade of grey doesn't make for the most thrilling subject matter!  My pavement sections had already been sized and primed and given a dark grey coat before Blood Eagle took priority. What remained was to dry brush them with a paler grey than the roads. I'd like to say this was a deliberate choice to provide some contrast on the boards. But that would be lying. My pot of grey was almost completely empty. So I went for my older tub of emulsion. This is actually quite nice and rather nostalgic, as it's the colour I used on my original modern city boards. You know, the one's that warped. So with over a hundred pieces to do, I set to work dry brushing.

Not that much to see, if I'm perfectly honest. Can't exactly call it exciting. And not all that much to look at to most people. But if you're making city boards, you need a lot of them.

Painting them took a while. Fear of covering up the thin lines kept me focused though.  I deliberately decided to be creative in the next shot, just to break up the monotony of the pictures I'm sharing.

And that was an afternoon's work. Not that exciting to read about. Not that exciting to photograph. But a perfectly enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. No clock watching. Just dry brushing. Oh, and the delight of listening to the latest podcast of Meeples and Miniatures with David from TM Terrain on it. Well worth a listen! It was almost as good as Craig Cartmell on the previous episode (which is pretty much impossible to beat in my book!) Go and listen to them! You know you want to! You can catch them here.

And with all this stuff dry, I've begun drawing out my first building in my foam core. Hopefully I'll be able to make regular posts in the coming days to share my progress, talking about what I've done and why.

Thanks for joining me on this journey and I look forward to sharing the next installment soon. Until then, thanks for stopping by!