You can spot the recently painted portee trucks in the foreground from their slightly different tone due to a flatter varnish, and five less years of aging in my gaming garage. I should also bust out my New Zealand North African Rifle Company for a few games of Flames of War, particularly now I’ve repriced the whole force to the latest army lists.

Next up I hope to finally finish my 15mm Ancient Carthaginian force too (which I planned to complete in 2008), and yes Griff, paint the last 11 Genestealers…

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1. Flames of War 6pdr Battery
2. Primer Madness II

A while back Jonathan mentioned he’d had some success using strips of weed mat and brown builder’s caulk to create flexible 15mm roads. I didn’t have any caulk handy but I did have half a tube of Selley’s Liquid Nails in the garage so tried it out myself. My test road features in the above photo. It’s nicely textured and takes paint well and is easily flexible enough to mold to the contours of my modular table set up. It worked so well I’ve put together this brief tutorial on how to create as much road strip as you need for negligble cost.

1. Assemble the materials. Like Jonathan I used a cheap, porous, textured weed mat for the base of my roads. It’s thin and sturdy with a low cost of around $8nz for a 5m roll of the stuff. Cut it into strips, arcs and other shapes as you need for your table. For this tutorial I’ve glued a couple of scraps together to create a ‘T’ junction piece.

You also need something to texture your road. Jonathan used a brown builder’s caulk, however I opted for Selley’s Liquid Nails. This DIY product dries to a water-proof flexible rubber consistency and I suspect it’s simply an industrial strength PVA. The advantage of using porous textured weed matting as the base is that the Liquid Nails will have no problem adhering to the matting, and dries into a fairly robust piece of terrain.

To detail the roads I used a mixture of cheap kitty litter and mixture of Woodland Scenics model railway ballasts (that is what’s in the plastic container in this photo). Three bags of varying grades of model railway ballast mixed together with some kitty litter for larger boulders and you’ve got yourself and endless supply of texturing gravel. I’ve been using this same plastic container of gravel for seven years to detail my Mordheim table and buildings, my 15mm North African terrain, other random scenery pieces and various figure bases.

The roads were textured with a set of cheap Chinese hog bristle art brushes, which were also used to paint the roads with a mixture of several interior acrylic house paint test pots from a local paint manufacturer.

2. Apply your Liquid Nails or Caulk. Once you’ve cut your weed mat into various shapes, it’s time to start slapping glue around. This is a particularly messy process so it’s best performed in old clothing in a work area. I found the easiest way to do it was to apply the Liquid Nails from the caulking gun in a tight ‘S’ pattern across a third of the weed matting. Then spread it across the mat to create a smooth surface using a wide, slightly wet brush. Take your time, cleaning the brush regularly but being careful not to dilute the liquid nails at all.

The glue will travel through the weed mat, so use a smooth work surface that you can peel the final road section off once complete. Here I’ve used the lid of a large plastic pail. Also don’t concern yourself about keeping a clean edge on the road piece. Just slap the glue around because once everything is dry you can just go back with a pair of scissors or an Xacto blade and trim the edges back neatly. It is also worth leaving yourself a couple of cm of weed mat uncovered at one end of the road so you’ve got something to handle the section by. I neglected to do so in this photo, so got a little messy when it came to removing the road strip to dry.

3. Coarsely texture the road with tire tracks. You need to apply some texture to the glue before it dries so you’ve got something to paint. The amount and type of texturing you want to do at this point depends on your setting. I textured my roads fairly heavily as they’re meant to represent hard pack sand trails through the North African desert. Of course depending on the final paint job they could have just as easily represent muddy Normandy farm roads or frozen rutted tracks across the Russian steppes.

At any rate what I did was take an old piece of bamboo and carved it into a spoon shape (see photo) and used this to carve fairly deep and rough ‘tracks’ into the glue. You can be fairly crude about it because this isn’t the final step of the texturing. If you don’t have bamboo handy, light dowel or balsa would work just as well.

4. Add some roadside gravel. For additional texturing I scattered some of my ballast mix around by applying several generous pinches of mix to the roadsides.

Don’t be too liberal because of course the point of roads is that they’re usually clear of obstacles! However once again this is meant to be a sort of crude desert trail and gravel at the road edges helps it visually blend into the table. Don’t worry about how well the stones are placed in the glue because the next step will help blend everything together nicely.

5. Smooth with a damp brush. To take the edge off the heavy texturing from step three and to get a good bond for the gravel from the last step take a wide, middling wet brush and lightly smooth it over the road section in a consistent direction. You’ll have to wash an re-wet the brush a few times depending on the length of your road section. You’re not trying to remove any glue here, but just to bed the gravel down and soften the heavy ruts so they look a little more realistic.

6. Leave to dry. You’re done! Make sure you give your brushes a good clean and leave your road strip somewhere warm to dry. It’s worth checking on the strip once or twice and once it’s started to cure, peeling it off the work surface to ensure it’s not permanently bonding to that! However make sure you leave the strip to dry completely before doing anything else with it. Obviously this depends on your climate and the type of ‘Liquid Nails’ or caulking you’ve used but I find overnight is usually sufficient.

Once dry you’ll have a flexible, textured piece of road strip that will be ready to paint. Don’t be surprised if the road curves inwards slightly as it dries because we can correct this during painting, and in the next post I’ll discuss how I’ve painted my road pieces to match my own gaming table.

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1. Tutorial: Desert Basing 28mm Pulp Figures
2. 15mm Tank Weathering Tutorial
3. Tutorial: Mold Making I

I did start the challenge fairly strong, with the three DAK armored platoons I needed primed and ready to paint. It wasn’t long before I’d weathered all my DAK tanks with Marmite and the turrets were finished a week later!

Then things went on the back burner and here we are early June and all I’ve managed to finish and varnish is the two DAK panzers you see above – a IIIJ late and a IV F2. Still I feel a little more inspired now and will try and get some more of this army painted this year. How did everybody else go?

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1. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge II
2. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge
3. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge III

Battlefront are increasing their prices on average 11% across their range of figures and vehicles in one week. Rulebooks and gaming accessories (dice, templates) are not increasing in price. It’s been over three years since our local New Zealand market has seen a price increase from Battlefront and I personally haven’t bought any Flames of War figures for almost exactly two years so I can’t really complain!

The good news is that while Battlefront are about to increase their prices, we’ve been promised those prices will stay in place for at least another two years, so once again we really have no grounds for complaint. The way Battlefront treat their customers still makes me glad I play their games, almost makes me wish I’d given them more of my money in fact! Which reminds me weren’t their vague rumors a while back about them starting a new period game system? Whatever happened to that? Daniel – you’re our resident Battlefront guru, any ideas?

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On this theme, John Campbell on TV3 last night mentioned ‘Expedition Saharan Saunter 2009′ which is a group of Long Range Desert Group re-creators:

“We are planning an Expedition to follow the footsteps (or wheel ruts) of the brave men of the LRDG and cover some of the routes and battlefields in the western desert. This will be a dynamic site updated regularly to keep all informed of our exciting project.”

Sounds like a hell of a challenge to me and I’ll be interested to see how they get on next year!

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1. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge
2. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge Long Gone
3. Space Hulk: Dipped Genestealers Group

This little diorama that is intended to show a couple of unfortunate motorbike pioneers that have found themselves behind enemy lines – Flames of War objectives are typically placed on the enemy side of the table.

It’s assembled from a mix of ‘bitz box’ pieces. The BMW + sidecar are from Battlefront, although I’ve sculpted a couple of cushions in the sidecar as this space is usually filed with a passenger. The figures are Peter Pig Germans in ‘relaxed’ poses, drinking from enamel mugs. One of them carries the MG34 for the sidecar. The open Zeltbahn tent is a two part resin cast of my original sculpts. The open side is held up by 1mm plastic rod. I intend to put these three Zeltbahn up for sale soon at $6us a pack of the three variants I’ve mentioned earlier.

Painting the objective will be interesting as Zeltbahn were printed in a disruptive and splinter camo which will probably be hard to replicate in 15mm! I’ll most likely just try and get a good faded look to the tent as this objective will be used for my DAK force.

Comments welcome as always, particularly if you’ve got any suggestions for getting over a modeling slump…

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1. FOW: 15mm Zeltbahn Tent Variants
2. FOW: Magnetised Tunisian Tiger
3. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge III

This first shot shows the Panzer IV turrets, with the commander getting the long barreled IV F2. My DAK force represents units from the 15 Panzer division in North Africa, hence the single digit turret designations. I believe these digits are supposed to be a solid red too, but these were the only decals I had to hand.

Here’s the HQ IIIj late turrets. You can see the weathering effect I applied to these tanks has been softened by the subsequent ink washing and drybrushing to give a reasonably convincing effect in 15mm scale. Now I just have to paint up a couple of tank bodies before the end of this month to have completed the first unit for the three month challenge.

Incidentally the photos on this post were taken after reading Hyun’s excellent mini photography tutorial on Wee Toy Soldiers. I’m not saying they’re superb photos by any means (the figures are too dark), but I think his tutorial has definitely improved my mini photography skills. Certainly worth checking out.

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1. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge Long Gone
2. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge
3. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge II

Base Coat your Model

For this tutorial we’ll be applying the base weathering coat to a Flames of War 15mm German ‘Famo’ 18-ton half track. This first photo shows you the model after it’s been base coated a with Tamiya German Gray spray can and left to thoroughly dry. You can also see the other supplies I’ll be using: a Tamiya Dark Yellow spray can, a fresh pot of delicious Marmite, an application tool and an old toothbrush. As our European or American visitors may have some difficulty finding Marmite, they may wish to experiment with other foodstuffs. The Marmite is really just used as a cheap masking medium that can be dabbed onto a model easily, isn’t too greasy or sticky and dissolves in warm water. Let us know what else works! It’s also worth noting that this technique requires you apply the top coat of paint as a spray, so you’ll either have to find a spray can of your chosen colour or own an airbrush.

Apply Delicious Marmite

My Marmite application tool is made from an old paintbrush handle, a rubber band and a torn half from one of my lovely wife’s round makeup sponges. Marmite is applied with the torn edge of the make up sponge which of course has a nicely random pattern to it. Dab the tool into the Marmite to load it up. Don’t get too much Marmite on there at once, I typically dab it on the bad of my hand or a scrap of paper to remove any excess until it produces a nice stippled pattern. I then dab the Marmite over the vehicle in appropriate places wear would occur. Reference photos and common sense apply here. Paint chips and damage usually happen to the fronts of vehicles and wear from crew entering/exiting the vehicle happens around doors and hatches etc. This second photo shows the Famo after I’ve applied the Marmite. Generally I’m not too fussy when it comes to applying the Marmite. If you end up with a few dabs here and there in the wrong place it doesn’t matter because you can always block paint over those areas while you’re finishing the vehicle off post weathering. For this particular model I haven’t bothered weathering the back tray at all because I have a set of stowage glued to some plasti-card I’m going to paint separately and drop into that space.

Top Coat your Model

Once you’re happy with your Marmite application simply spray the top coat of paint on and leave it to dry. Here’s the Famo after a Tamiya Desert Yellow spray. It’s essential that both the base and top coats of paint are completely dry for the weathering to work correctly. This is because the final step involves a moderately vigorous scrubbing with warm water and your old toothbrush. So leave your vehicle until you’re absolutely sure the paint has dried to a sturdy top coat – otherwise you’re likely to scrub the vehicle back down to the base coat!

Bath Time

For the final step, take your painted model and immerse it in a mixture of fairly warm water and household dish-washing detergent. Leave it there for a minute or two for the Marmite to soften and then carefully scrub every surface of the model with your old toothbrush. The Marmite will dissolve into the water, taking patches of the top coat with it and reveal the base coat underneath. Keep scrubbing until you’re confident you’ve removed all trace of the Marmite and then leave your model to dry.

Here’s the 18 ton Famo after it’s been scrubbed. This completes the basic weathering effect and over-painting and detail work can now begin. The weathering at this point may look quite stark and a touch over-done, but it’ll be toned down with futher painting steps. Typically I brown ink-wash my vehicles after this step to bring out the edges etc. and then block coat the basic colour over the vehicle again, fixing up any overly zealous weathering as I go. Then a couple of layers of lighter colour are drybrushed on to pick out the edges and mute the weathering down.

Comments and questions are welcomed as always!

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1. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge II
2. 15mm Tank Weathering Tutorial
3. 15mm Tank Weathering using Toothpaste

One of the variants open on the other side, and the other is sculpted in two parts to represent an open sided tent. The idea is to cut a couple of thin pieces of 0.8mm wires and use them as poles to support the open side. I’ve placed the masters down next to a base of Flames of War German Panzergrenadiers.

I plan to mold these over the weekend and then try a few resin casts and build up a custom objective for my DAK Germans. Right, now these are out of the way it’s back to painting!

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1. FOW: German Zeltbahn Objective
2. 15mm Tank Weathering Tutorial
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Here’s all the Panzers and new Tiger for my DAK force spray painted using a simple weathering technique. It’s a little hard to see in this night-time photo, but they’ve all been based Tamiya German Gray, spattered with Marmite (using a ripped up makeup sponge purloined from my wife’s bedside table) and then sprayed over with Tamiya Dark Yellow. Once the top coat was dry the tanks were soaked in hot, soapy water and then scrubbed down with an old toothbrush. The Marmite disolves, lifting the top coat away to reveal the German Gray underneath. The effect is probably most obvious on the hulking great Tunisian Tiger 1E by looking at the turret top and 88 barrel for example. A couple of people over in the Flames of War forum expressed interest in the technique so I’ll try getting a photo tutorial together shortly.

For the challenge I only need to paint five of the Panzers but thought I might as well hit all the tanks with the technique at once to save some spray paint. I’ve also block painted and weathered the turrets of those five Panzers I need, although still have the turned out crew to paint and have a couple of the tank bodies ink washed too. I’ll post some more progress once I have some tanks completely painted. Of course I need to finish at least two this month to meet the challenge, but I’m fairly confident that’s achievable!

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3. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge

Fortunately one member of our gaming group has so many Flames of Wars figures, vehicles and entire armies that he’s usually pretty good to hit up for spare stuff. So I traded one of my 1930’s facades and a few resin Zeltbahn for one slightly used Tunisian Tiger 1E from the “Shop of Daniel”.

After stripping it with methylated spirits I took it apart and then pinned the tracks and barrel back on. I stuffed the housing ring a little getting the barrel off, but nothing a touch of green stuff won’t fix. The Tiger was apparently painted using Vallejo and I was surprised how easily it stripped off in meths. Typically I paint everything with Tamiya or Games Workshop acrylics and have always had to leave stripping pieces in overnight to soften these paint jobs. Not so with Vallejo, because after dumping the Tiger in, the paint almost immediately softened and could be rubbed off with a finger tip. A point worth remembering for the future I suppose.

As the Tiger has such a large nose-heavy turret I also broke out some rare earth magnets and dropped a couple into the turret and body and damned if they don’t work a treat! The turret isn’t at all floppy after magnetising and traverses very nicely and smoothly. I’m now considering using the rest of my rare earth magnets to do the same to my remaining Panzers and possibly my painted NZ Shermans and Stuarts. It takes a little more effort to do, and make very sure you glue the magnets in the right way, but damaged and lost turrets should be a thing of the past if I do all my tanks this way.

Update: Since writing this post I spent another hour going through all my other Panzers magnetising the turrets. Things went surprisingly quickly despite some annoying stuff ups along the way. Note: make sure you get ALL the magnets in ALL the turrets glued in place with the same polarity!

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2. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge III
3. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge Long Gone

The painting challenge starts tomorrow on the 1st of Feb, so here’s my ‘before’ photo. I’ve changed my choice of platoon to paint a little from the last post, mainly because I didn’t want to paint five Panzer IIIj lates all at the same time. The photo shows the three platoons I’ll be painting for my mid-war DAK Armored Coy:

• HQ – Two IIIj lates in the foreground along with the massive recovery half-track. The stowage is glued to a piece of 1mm plasti-card cut to fit into the back tray. I’ve done this so I can paint all the barrels etc. and then just glue them into the painted vehicle.

• Combat – The other three Panzers IV Ausf F1’s and an F2. Heh, I’ve laid them out kinda funny too I notice.

• Div Support – Flak 88’s naturally. Although I’m tossing up swapping them out for a Tiger IE. Two emplaced 88’s and a command base + the transports. If anything gets dropped from my challenge it’ll be those three transports since I haven’t assembled nor primed the flak 88 gun carriages.

I’m hoping to get all five tanks and maybe those transports mostly finished in the first month using a production line, a couple of Tamiya spray cans (German Grey + Dark Yellow) and a technique similar to the one I used to paint my 28mm Opel Blitz and Sdkfz 222 Armored car.

I’ve also started a thread over on the official Flames of War forums about this informal challenge, which seems to have generated a mild interest there too. Hopefully we’ll see some people posting images of nicely painted models in a month or so!

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2. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge III
3. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge Long Gone

To motivate ourselves we’re putting a friendly painting challenge together: Each person has three months to paint the following:

• Three platoons – preferably an HQ, Combat platoon and Support Platoon, but any three outstanding unpainted platoons will do.

Or

• 750 points of figures, or vehicles or platoons.

The idea is to paint the core of a new army, and three platoons or 750pts is half of a 1500pt army! If you’re painting three platoons that also means you can aim to finish one each month of the challenge.

To give people some prep-time for assembling and basing their figures prior to starting the challenge we’re starting the challenge on the first of February. I’m also posting the challenge up here on the blog as an open invitation to any Flames of War gamers visiting to join the challenge.

One thing we will need from anybody that does want to join in is documentary evidence in the form of digital photos. We really only need two photos – one of your unpainted forces at the start, and one of the painted forces at the end! But I’m always keen to see in-progress photos myself.

Personally I need to get some paint on my assembled and mostly primed DAK Armored Company, that’s what you see in the photo above. I’ll be painting the following three platoons:

1. HQ: Two IIIj Late Panzers.
2. Combat: Three IIIj Late Panzers.
3. Support: Divisional Heavy AA Gun Platoon (88’s!). Unlimbered only although I should get their transports painted too.

I’m considering throwing in a few prizes to motivate people if they’re interested. I was thinking either one of our 15mm straight trench kits, or a 15mm 1930’s building facade. Would that help people complete the challenge?

So who’s in?!

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2. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge Long Gone
3. FOW: Three Month Painting Challenge III

I have to agree with his review, this is a great little glossy book and fine value for money at $21nz locally. Personally I didn’t find the hobby tips contained within to include any great revelations but they certainly cover all the bases. What I did enjoy was seeing other modeler’s figures and vehicles so nicely displayed. The modeler’s featured were wisely chosen too, covering a range of different painting styles and armies.

In particular I enjoyed seeing Antti Heiskanen’s collection as my method of painting FOW figures is somewhat similar to his, although Antti’s style is much more extreme in terms of shading. I’m quite tempted to bust out a few spare bases of NZer infantry and try out his suggestions regarding painting and highlighting.

Also if you’re relatively new to Flames of War, or thinking of picking it up then I’d definitely recommend grabbing a copy of this book because it’s packed full of useful information regarding preparing and painting 15mm WWII figures.

As an aside I’m a little out of touch regarding Flames of War at the moment because frankly I can’t stand their new web site. Both forums and the web store seem to have become a lot harder to navigate!

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For some variety I’ve painted the doors different colours and glued different ‘drapes’ into the windows. The drapes are fashioned from various bits of coloured paper, while the window panes are cut from a 1mm thick piece of transparent lamination sheet supplied by my lovely wife. I was going to sacrifice an OHP transparency for the windows, but the thicker laminating plastic turned out to be a lot easier to work with, plus the extra thickness means it does quite a convincing job of looking like plate glass.

Due to the detail work I wanted to do with the windows the buildings were assembled in two stories which turned out to be a little problematic when it came to the house with the blue door because the stories don’t fit together terribly well. This is a little annoying but isn’t a show stopper as most of the problem has occurred on the interior walls which are hidden when the house is placed in the row. If you’re wondering what’s going on with the chimneys and doors, it’s because the house with the green door has been assembled mirrored from the other two houses just for a little variation.

Painting the Linka brick work turned out to be fairly painless as the bricks pop out nicely when painted diagonally with a wide drybrush. The buildings you see here have been drybrushed with GW’s Graveyard Earth and then had individual bricks picked out in Kommando Khaki, Terracotta Red and Scorched Brown. The slate roofs were painting with a blend of Fortress Grey and Chaos Black and then given a dark ink wash just to dull the greys down a touch.

Everything was then coated with a spray matt varnish and then the doors and window frames were hand painted with a Tamiya gloss varnish to simulate enamel paintwork. The gloss varnish work doesn’t show up too well in these night-time photos, but is noticeable on the models themselves.

For the Flames of War gamers out there, here’s a comparison shot of a 1:100th FOW Sherman tank against the 1:86th Dublo scale buildings. As you’d expect the Shermie looks a touch small against the over-scale buildings, particularly when you compare it with the WWII period photo next to it. I admit the two photos are taken from different angles, but I feel the top of the Sherman’s turret should at least exceed the height of the ground floor house windows. Unfortunately I neglected to put a base of men in the shot as well, but I can tell you they definitely look noticeably small next to the doors and windows of the Dublo scale houses.

So it’s hard to say how useful Linkaworld Linka molds will be to the average Flames of War gamer. In my opinion the Linka doors and windows definitely won’t work well next to Flames of War vehicles and figure bases. However there are several Linka molds that contain basic textures that would be excellent for Flames of War terrain. Molds B1, B5 and B6 all contain brick sections of various shapes that could be easily put together to make convincing bombed out buildings. Similar ruined stone buildings could be constructed from molds S1, S3 and S5.

As the molds are only $12usd each and made from a very robust rubber material I’d say it’s probably not a bad investment to pick up a few for your Flames of War table if you need to construct a lot of simple, ruined buildings.

Anyway, here’s hoping my father in law enjoys these buildings! And have a good Christmas yourself!

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1. Linka Dublo Brick Terraced Houses
2. Linka Dublo Brick Terraced Houses II
3. 1930’s 15mm Building Facade Complete