My order arrived last week and I was pleasantly surprised how much fun mold #320 is to cast and build with. It’s a pretty hungry mold plaster-wise, but a single cast gets you enough bits and pieces of pipe to make an interesting 6″ linear barrier for pretty much any 28mm scale war game you can think of. The pipe sections obviously work very well for sci-fi or modern terrain, but with the right brassy paint job a few pieces could probably be added to the side of a fantasy building for some kind of brewery or mad alchemist’s laboratory.

After casting the mold a couple of times I couldn’t resist playing with the parts and dug out a pre-cut and bevelled 3mm MDF base I had kicking around. I cut and bevelled a whole bunch of random organic shapes years ago and have been working my way through the stack ever since. It’s a great time saver for just cracking into a random terrain piece when you feel like it.

This bit of Necromunda/40k/Pulp terrain is made from just two casts of mold #320, a piece of cut chicken wire, some corrugated cardboard and based with a mix of kitty little and model railway ballast. The chicken wire and cardboard was used to build that little shack over a vertical tap piece which is obscured in the photos, but you can see in the unpainted terrain.

The pipes were painted with grey latex house paint and then weathered with the Vegemite technique before airbrushing them red with hobby paints and then over-painting them with my home-made dipping varnish. The base is just dry brushed with a couple of layers of dirty brown latex house paint as well. Things were left pretty generic as I plan to use this terrain for Pulp gaming, and possibly Necromunda or 40k terrain if I ever get around to playing those systems again. I’ve included a couple of Games Workshop Imperial Guard Cadians just for scale indication.

Related posts:

1. Hirst Arts Cathedral Update VI

The portholes were mastered from a 1mm ceramic tap washer with a set of green stuff rivets applied using the end of a mechanical pencil. I have to thank Dustan for telling me how easy this technique is for 28mm scale rivets. I found it so useful I’ve converted the mechanical pencil tip into a permanent riveting tool by epoxying it to a bamboo shaft. Now I have a useful porthole I’m wondering what else I can use it for? Maybe for detailing the bollards if I ever get around to building a suitable dockside for the Tramp Steamer.

I need to apply a little more detail to the ship before I start painting it. I’d like a deck winch of some kind at the bow, a set of anchors and I’ll also need to bend some wire to make a set of radio antenna on the roof of the bridge. That’ll probably do I think as the ship is primarily intended as a gaming surface, not a scale model of a real ship of any kind.

Related posts:

1. Tramp Steamer Ship Doors – Pulp

However playing an interesting Pulp scenario across various hand drawn maps representing the interior decks, and finishing on the ship itself was great fun and inspired me to do some sculpting to finish the blighter off. First up I needed ship’s doors and portholes to cover the blank holes I’d cut in the 2mm cardboard used for the superstructure. A little research netted various pictures of ship’s doors. I went for a simple double dogged door and frame. It’s all just cut from 1mm plasticard with dremmeled curves and detailed with trimmed plastic rail and greenstuff. The frame and door aren’t very symmetric, but once molded and cast that shouldn’t be too obviously hopefully. Heck it’s a rusty old tramp steamer after all.

I plan to cast these in Ultrasil Blue and them mold them in resin. I briefly considered trying to make the door have a working hinge, but then figured tiny 2mm resin hinges wouldn’t stand up to any serious gaming. I’ll leave the doors detached, but probably glue some plasti-card rails to the backs so they can be pushed into the fixed frame.

Unfortunately I discovered while I still have plenty of Ultrasil rubber left, the blue hardening compound has dried to dust, which after some experimenting seems to just be the blue colouring as the rubber will no longer set. Damn. Guess I shouldn’t have left it on the shelf for years. So I’m picking up a new kit from TopMark tomorrow and will have to finish off a few projects to try and use the kit up rather than sticking it in the garage for years to expire!

Update: Picked up another small Ultrasil Blue kit from TopMark today and had a word with their ever helpful staff. Apparently it’s not uncommon for people to want to purchase more of the blue ‘Part B’ hardener out of these kits so they sell it separately in 50ml (for $16NZ) and 25ml bottles. 50ml of hardener is what you get in the smallest Ultrasil set that I purchased, so I certainly didn’t need that much. Unfortunately they were out of 25ml bottles at the time. Ah well, I’ll stretch the new kit as far as I can on hardener and see how it goes. Molding up a couple of sculpts as we speak to finish off a few things.

Related posts:

1. Tramp Steamer Portholes – Pulp

Our kids have gone through most of the series, excavating classics like Tyrannosaurs, Stegosaurs, Triceratops, Brachiosaurs and Pteradons. They’re from 4M Industries and are available locally (in New Zealand) from a bunch of places, including IQ Toys, The Warehouse and even our local Pak’n'Save supermarket for roughly $20nz a kit.

I was vacuuming up the latest lot of red dust from the living room when it occurred to me that these kits are almost the right scale for 28mm Pulp figures. A quick wiki for a comparative chart of Tyrannosaur specimens and they seem fairly close. So I nabbed the Tyrannosaur off my son’s bookshelf and took the photos you see here. Those are a couple of Copplestone Casting figures standing under the plastic Tyrannosaur.

Looking at the figures together it seems dinosaur is a touch over scale, maybe about 5-8% too large. It probably doesn’t help that the dinosaur is high rearing pose, a bit of cutting and reposing would probably fix that, but as I said this is from my son’s bookshelf so that’s not an option for this particular figure. The very white plastic is also a little off putting, but you know what would fix that? A nice overcoat of some home-made varnish based dip. The plastic these kits are made from is that cheap, fairly flexible stuff so I wouldn’t recommend trying to paint one with any kind of water based acrylic paint, but a polyurethane varnish would probably adhere fairly well.

So, if you’re looking for a cheap, roughly 28mm Dinosaur skeleton, I’d recommend these toy kits from 4M industries. Even if you don’t use the whole figure, they’re still a useful model for Pulp gaming. I intend to experiment with push molding the head and maybe several of the bones to try and create my own set of ‘paleontology excavation’ terrain pieces.

As I’ve often admired Black Scorpion’s range of Tombstone range figures, I thought this would be an ideal time to pick some up. However I didn’t just want cowboys, but rather some figures that might mix into my Pulp collection as well. Black Scorpion have two groups of female figures that seemed like a good compromise, Tombstone 5 and Tombstone 6, most of which would work in a Pulp setting too. I ordered them from the Black Scorpion site a couple of weeks ago and they’ve just arrived, so here’s a quick review and comparison against a couple of other independent figure manufacturers.

Casting

On unpacking it’s clear the figures are well cast. There’s almost no flash (one figure of ten had some flash under an arm), and only visible mold lines on a couple of figures that had to be filed down. The mold lines are also well placed, with no lines crossing faces or other important details. One minor annoyance is the fact that I had to straighten the barrels on every figure holding a gun out of the box. I suspect this is because rough handling by international post, as the figures have travelled from the UK to New Zealand. As you can see from the photo the figures use a slotta base system and have molded on tabs. I’ll probably be cutting a few of these off so I can base some figures on wooden planks.

Sculpting

The figures are well sculpted with a nice variety of clothing and hair styles. For female 28mm figures they have fairly realistic proportions with only a single figure displaying an enormous chest and cleavage – I guess there had to be one! They’re generally statically posed, with only four of the ten figures actively aiming or drawing their weapons, but it’s a nice mix of poses I think. The static figures are presenting their arms in a gun-safe but threatening manner.

They also have a nice mix of firearms, with two shotguns (either of which could be filed down to make them sawn-off), two recognisable Winchester repeaters, four armed with a variety of single and dual revolvers and two unarmed ‘showgirl’ figures (maybe they have derringers). This mix of weapons makes them ideal for putting together a couple of Legends of the Old West posses.

In terms of detail the figures are passable. Period costume of the Old West was pretty simple and this is reflected on the miniatures, with decoration consisting of tassled fringes and the odd bow. In terms of detail I’d say the Black Scorpion figures are comparable to the Copplestone Casting ranges, but not as detailed or crisp as the Artizan Designs collection.

The wide mix of clothing, hats and hairstyles will keep the figures interesting to paint though. I particularly like the figure that looks like a gentle homemaker, in a full dress and leg’o'mutton jacket, clutching a sun umbrella in one hand and a Winchester repeating rifle in the other…!

Scale

Black Scorpion state their figures are ’32mm’ scale, which equates to the so called ‘Heroic 28mm’ that Games Workshop use. Here’s a photo comparing several of the Black Scorpion figures to an WWII Artizan Designs 28mm German and a Copplestone Castings female archaeologist. I’ve chosen the tallest of the Black Scorpion ladies for comparison and as you can see there is a noticeable scale difference. However as it’s not often you see figures lined up like this on the tabletop I can’t see any problem mixing and matching these slightly larger figures with the rest of my Pulp collection.

Cost

At GBP7.50 for each group of five figures, plus 15% for shipping internationally they’re a pretty good deal and I’m perfectly happy to recommend them to anybody after some 28-32mm Western miniatures. I ordered directly off their site and had no problem getting the items shipped international air to a New Zealand PO Box.

Black Scorpion also have several other interesting looking ranges, in particular their Pirates, Fantasy Pirates and Iraqii Militia all look good to me.

The lady on the left is from Copplestone Castings and the Wehrmacht sentry is from Artizan Designs. That lantern jawed German has been kicking around my paint station for no less than two years, since I last got some Pulp painting done. So it’s a relief to finally have him packed away in the gaming cupboard.

The irony is that having painted some Pulp figures, Daniel and his flatmate, in a fit of madness, dropped $300nz each on Warhammer Fantasy figures. So it seems we may be playing some Border Patrol in the near future! Might be time to assemble some of the Orcs I bought in 2006. Funny how this stuff goes in cycles isn’t it?

Related posts:

1. Pulp: Tempus Fugit Scenario
2. Cheap 28mm Scale Dinosaur – Pulp
3. Tramp Steamer Portholes – Pulp

I’ve converted the Tempus Fugit scenario into a small PDF you can download. The scenario is designed for four to six players, each with a couple of figures. It’s pretty straight forward except there’s a hidden aspect, so players don’t know who else is a friend or foe. This resulted in some hilarity in the play through, with my own villain and his sidekick getting ruthlessly and repeatedly shot by other villains on the table. I guess there’s no honour amoungst power crazed madmen?

Related posts:

1. Tramp Steamer Ship Doors – Pulp
2. Pulp: Lady and the Sentry
3. Cheap 28mm Scale Dinosaur – Pulp

This left the figure looking rather dark and very shiny because of the wax in the Klear floor polish I used. That’s fine though because once the wash dries you’ll have a very stable, hard coat you can easily paint over.

5. Painting Over the Magic Wash. The point of the chestnut ink wash was to define the folds and edges in the figure. In a sense the quick ink wash provides a similar effect to the ‘black lining’ others paint with. This is where you prime your figure black and build up the colours over that while leaving thin black lines between the various areas of the figure.

However I prefer priming white and find that a simple ink wash is easier to apply than a lot of careful painting over black, and yet has much the same effect. The translucent nature of ink is also an easy way to give the flat base colours some more depth and character.

Once the magic wash is completely dry (usually overnight) I start repainting the figure in exactly the same colours I used to base coat the figure over the primer. Although of course I’m not attempting to entirely cover the ink wash, but rather using the way it has dried on the figure as a guide to highlighting the figure. This is a little hard to explain in words, so have a look at a few of the photos. The inked areas are always fairly easy to spot because they’ll remain shiny until we varnish the figure.

At this point I usually also spend some time highlighting any areas of flesh on the figure. I do this now because they’re usually relatively small areas on most of the figures I’m painting, and the face is quite a central feature on any figure. As an aside I use Games Workshop paints fairly exclusively as they’re easy to source locally and I’m familiar with them. However I really detest the GW range of flesh tones, because not a single one of them is remotely flesh coloured in my opinion! I regularly buy a couple of GW mixing pots and blend up my own basic flesh tone from a mix of Bestial Brown, Scab Red and Bronzed Flesh. I find since GW changed to the new style of paint pots their empty mixing pots are a fine investment because they’ll hold paint for quite some time without drying out.

I paint my highlights by simply mixing a couple of colours between the base flesh tone on the figure and the lightest flesh tone I want to appear on the final figure. I invariably mix these on the top of my GW pots as I paint, which can make it hard to find a pot of a certain colour on my paint station! I really should get around to throwing together a wet palette because that would be less messy in the long term.

6. Highlighting the Figure. From this point on I’m simply painting smaller and smaller areas of the figure with lighter and lighter tones. I don’t blend the paint on the figure, but tend to blend three or four intermediate tones on my pot lid ‘palette’ as I apply one colour of highlights to the figure.

For example this figure has had roughly six rounds of highlighting applied to it. Red for the fez, a custom blend for the skin tones, Desert Yellow + Bleached Bone for the cloak and puttees, Scorched Brown/Bestial Brown + Bleached Bone for the leather work, Sun Yellow + Bleached Bone for the trousers and various metals for the pistol and grenade.

You may have noticed above that I’ve been lightening my basic colours with Bleached Bone (a creme colour) rather than a hard titanium white like Skull White. I find mixing colours with Bleached Bone means you tend to retain the same tone to the original colour, whereas Skull White tends to change the base colour more radically, moving red to pink for example. I’m sure a more learned painter could explain this in terms of colour theory, but I’ll just offer it as a piece of simple advice.

I paint my figures based on the assumption that the natural light is usually falling from almost directly above – ‘high noon’ style if you will. Also keep in mind that as a gaming piece, this figure will spend most of its life viewed from a ‘gamer’s eye’ view of about 3′ away at an angle of around 60 degrees. This means you can often avoid highlighting any part underneath the figure and rely on the base coat + ink wash to provide adequate coverage over the white primer. For example this Moroccan figure has been painted with yellow pantaloons, although only his right knee has seen any attempt at highlighting.

Since we’re speed painting a figure for the tabletop I always try to cut corner if it’s not going to have a large effect on the final figure. For example this chap, like most of my Pulp figures, has no painted eyeballs. This can look a little odd if you examine the figure closely, but trust me you’re not going to notice the missing eyeballs once he’s on the game table – plus you can always say he’s squinting in the harsh North African sunshine.

I’ve dodged some more painting too by simply leaving his beard as it was after the ink wash. It’s a little redder than is probably common on a gentleman most likely of Semitic descent, but hey the Vikings made it down to ancient Spain which is a stone’s throw across the Mediterranean to North Africa! Just keep the ‘three foot’ rule in mind while you paint for the tabletop. If you can’t distinguish a particular piece of detail on the figure from three feet away, don’t spend a lot of time finely painting it.

7. Killing the Shine – Varnishing the Figure.

Once you’ve finished painting it’s finally time to do something about that awful wax shine! Let your painted figure completely dry over a couple of hours and then varnish it. I double varnish my figures these days, first hitting them with a good dose of cheap artist’s matt varnish that frankly isn’t terribly matt at all. Once that’s completely dry I give the figure a final dusting of an excellent local New Zealand spray varnish called ‘Moana Matt Varnish’. This is a stellar product available from Gordon Harris art stores. It’s not cheap, a small can will cost you $10 but you only need a light dusting to get a really matt coat on a figure.

So there you have it, I hope you’ve enjoyed this slightly disjointed series of tutorials where I’ve taken a raw metal figure and painted it, and as always feel free to ask questions or add your own painting advice in the comment section below.

Related posts:

1. Cheap 28mm Scale Dinosaur – Pulp
2. Tutorial: Weathering Vehicles with Marmite
3. Tutorial: Cheap Flexible 15mm Roads

The rest of Matakishi’s site is top notch too, and if you’re a Pulp gamer you’ve probably already seen his cork-tile inner-city buildings in the past.

Via Rattrap’s Speakeasy.

Related posts:

1. Pulp: Tempus Fugit Scenario
2. Pulp: Lady and the Sentry
3. Tramp Steamer Portholes – Pulp

For this tutorial I’ll be painting up one of the Anglian Miniatures Moroccan Spanish Civil War tank hunters from the basing tutorial. As I’ll be using him for generic Pulp gaming I’ve made no attempt to adhere to historic colours so apologies to any Spanish Civil War buffs out there!

1. Prime Everything. First I seriously recommend priming anything you paint for gaming, be it figures or terrain. Priming both your metal and plastic figures with an appropriate product will help make your final paint jobs much more resistant to handling and knocking about during gaming. This is because primers are formulated to cover metal and plastics well and also dry to a finish with some ‘tooth’ for further layers of paint to adhere too.

For figure priming I’ve always used Games Workshop’s increasingly expensive Citadel Skull White Primer. However be careful where you purchase it from as I’ve picked up dud cans in the past. Several gaming friends use cheaper spray products, typically flat grey automotive primers. However I don’t mind paying a little more for a product I know has worked well for years.

Apply your primer sparingly and try to hit each side of the figure evenly. I typically line up a bunch of prepared figures, spray across them and then rotate each individually 90 degrees (yet another reason to blue tack them to old drink bottle caps) and repeat until I’ve hit each side. Don’t douse your figures in primer as that will just obscure details, instead aim for reasonable coverage and don’t be too concerned if you can see a little bare metal from certain odd angles once you’re done. You just want to make sure you’ve primed the areas that are going to be handled during gaming. For example you can see the base on my example figure hasn’t been that well covered, but the figure has. That’s because I usually handle figures by the shoulders when gaming.

2. Flat Paint Basecoat Colours. Once the primed figure has dried I transfer it to my paint station and start applying flat base coat colours from my motley selection of Games Workshop and Tamiya acrylic pots. The idea here is to lay down basic colours to completely cover the primer. This is where the fun starts as you need to make choices about how you want the final figure to appear. After this I’m going to apply an ink wash and then work them up with some quick highlights, but as this first layer dictates the overall figure colours, choose wisely!

One beauty of using a white primer is that you’ll only ever need a single coat of acrylic to cover it which makes for fast figure painting. I find white primer also gives your base colours a nice ‘pop’ and I’m sure it helps contribute to the clean look of the final figure. It also makes sense when you’re painting figures for a desert theme as it reflects the kind of harsh, flat white light you’ll find in that environment.

I’ve tried black priming in the past and generally found it to be a nightmare to paint over, particularly with any kind of light colours like yellows and flesh tones. I’m fully prepared to admit I’m in a minority here, but really can’t understand why so many painting tutorials published by large gaming companies insist on teaching you to black prime and then laboriously cover the black primer with layers and layers of paint.

I paint with a handful of artist’s OOO and OO paint brushes. I only ever paint with sable brushes (ie. the red ones) and completely avoid synthetic nylon brushes (ie. the white ones) as frankly I’ve found them to have little merit. Nylon brushes in particular seem to lose their ‘point’ quickly which makes them almost worthless for figure painting.

I’d say find the best mid-price sable brushes you can at your local art supply store and use those. Certain companies will try and sell you overpriced ‘hobby figure painting brushes’ which are of course just re-branded art brushes! Also don’t bother with fancy brush soaps etc, just keep a pot of clean water nearby and make sure you rinse your brushes after you’ve finished apply each layer of paint and never let paint dry on the brush itself. Also never leave any brush head down in the water pot because that’ll bend the bristles and destroy the ‘point’ on the brush, making it useless for figure painting.

While painting figures there’s only two common-sense guidelines I try to follow: Inside out and light over dark. Inside out is where you paint the central details of the figure out to the edges because the central parts of the figure are generally harder to reach. Our example figure shows this nicely with a number of straps, holsters and pouches covering his chest while his ‘outside’ consists of a simple flowing robe.

Light over dark is where you apply dark colours earlier and then lighter colours later. This is because it’s very easy to correct light colours accidently painted over dark areas by applying some more of the darker color, however it can be difficult to correct dark colours slopped over light areas by applying more of the lighter color!

3. Dry Brushed Ground. I’m about to apply a ‘magic ink’ wash as the next step, however before I do that I dry-brush the figure’s base to bring out the textured nature of it. Using a larger, older sable brush I dry brush GW’s Bleach Bone over the base, followed by a lighter dry brush of Skull White. I don’t pay too much attention to keeping the dry brushing off the character’s shoes because I like to think it adds a cheap ‘dust’ effect to the shoe leather.

4. Magic Ink Wash. This is the final step we’ll cover in this post as it seems to be getting rather long. Here I’m applying a chestnut ink ‘magic wash’ over the entire figure as well as the ground underneath.

This is another process that speeds up my figure painting considerably because it gives you some interesting depth to the figure for almost no effort and also guides you towards which area of the figure should receive highlighting later on.

In the photo you see the example figure after the magic wash has been applied and you may well be thinking ‘wow that looks like crap’ about now. However keep in mind this is an intermediate step and at least several coats of repainting are going to go over this in the next post in this tutorial, so bear with me!

Magic wash is a blend of finest tap water and Johnson & Johnson’s Klear Floor Polish product mixed in a 7:3 ratio respectively. Klear Floor Polish is largely made up of wax, dissolved in an ammonia solution by the smell of it. I pre-mix this magic wash and store it in cheap dropper bottles which I then mix in a 1:1 ratio with Games Workshop inks.

Why bother? Well, if you paint with straight inks you’ll find they tend to pool as well as not flow that well into minor details, this is because of the surface tension of the ink (or rather the water in the ink). Mixing your inks with a wax solution reduces surface tension which means ink flows into tiny details on the figure and tends to pool less which is good. For more details Google for ‘magic wash’ and you’ll find articles like this from the Painting Clinic. They’re using a slightly different product but for the same reason.

The other advantage of Klear is because it’s a floor wax it’s designed to dry to a hard, rather shiny coat. This works for us because it nicely seals the base coat colours and gives you a robust coat to paint further colours over. In the past I’ve also found that painting over straight ink washes can be problematic depending on the ink. The high shine finish is a downside, but that’s easily fixed by applying a decent matt spray varnish once your figure is complete.

Note that because I’m painting my Pulp figures for a dusty desert environment I typically use a fairly brown/red palette of colours which allows me to get away with a single chestnut ink wash. This single wash also deals nicely with the tanned or Semitic skin tones. If you’re interested in magic washing blue and green inks you certainly can but it’ll add more steps to your painting process as you’ll have to hit individual areas of the figures with different washes.

Also note my single quick and dirty chestnut ink wash has been applied to both the figure and the ground. Post ink wash the ground is complete for this figure and I’ll be apply no more paint there.

Stay tuned for the next post when I’ll finish the example figure off with some repainting and highlighting and then varnish the beggar. Comments and questions are welcome as always of course.

Related posts:

1. Cheap 28mm Scale Dinosaur – Pulp
2. Tutorial: Weathering Vehicles with Marmite
3. Tutorial: Cheap Flexible 15mm Roads

Of course, before you paint a 28mm figure you’ve got to base it! So I’ll start the ball rolling with this tutorial on basing figures for the Egyptian/North African desert setting we game in.

1. Assemble your materials. I use Selley’s ‘Permafill’ wall repair product for basing my figures. Applying and clean up is easy because it’s water soluble, and it also dries to a very hard surface. I use the Permafill for a basic smooth sand effect, to add a little variety I scatter small rocks across the bases too. Primarily I use a mixture of three different sizes of Woodland Scenic’s Model Railway ballast and fresh kitty litter – that’s the white stone you see. For larger rocks I use pieces of cheap green marble scatter from the local gardening centre.

2. Prepare your figures. Do the usual clean up on your figures, removing mold lines and flash and then super glue them to your basic bases! For this tutorial I’ll be using three figures from the Anglian Miniatures Moroccans range I purchased recently.

I use Games Workshop round plastic bases because I have so many of them in the bitz box. Unfortunately they have a textured surface which can make it hard to get a decent bond between the figure’s metal foot plate and the plastic base. I usually sand this texture off first by rubbing the bases across a strip of 180 grit sandpaper.

Once the figures are securely glued down I give everything a wash in warm water and dish washing liquid, just to get rid of any commercial mold release residue and/or greasy finger prints. When the figure is dry I attach them to the disposable plastic cap from kiddie drink bottles with a large dollop of Blu Tack as you can see in the photo. I’ve found it’s invaluable to have some way of handling figures during painting that doesn’t involve touching the figure or their base at all.

3. Apply Permafill. I use a double spooned sculpting tool I picked up from Pityak Studios that has since become invaluable. I keep the sculpting tool fairly wet from a pot of tap water as I apply the permafill around the figure. Keeping the tool wet helps to get the permafill onto the base as it’s moderately tacky, with a texture a bit like gritty toothpaste.

Essentially what you’re trying to do is build up a little rounded mound of material that smoothly travels from the plastic base edge to just cover the 1-2mm thick metal foot plate of your figure. I think the above shot nicely shows this transition.

Don’t be concerned if you can still see the metal plate through the permafill once you’ve applied it, the trick is simply to cover that smooth metal with a bit of texture. Everything is going to be primed prior to painting anyway!

Also don’t concern yourself with trying to make the permafill perfectly smooth, as it’s meant to represent sand that your figure is running, walking through etc. So slap it about a bit to give it some character to dry-brush over, which this second shot hopefully shows.

Having said that the permafill in that second shot does look reasonably smooth because of the water I’ve mixed into it during application. However it will still dry to a nice rough texture while moderately diluted and those smooth curves will end up with textured edges.

Then I clean up any splashes on the base sides by running my finger around the base and move onto the final step.

4. Pebbles to Boulders. This final step is actually optional. If you simply apply permafill and leave it to dry you’ll have a figure that is essentially based in simple sand which is fine. However that can get a little monotonous over an entire group of figures, so I usually apply some scattered rocks onto the base while the permafill is still wet. Varying the size and amount of material applied as desired!

The above three figures show the possibilities. The street hawker on the right has simply been based on permafill. The central zombie has had a light scattering of very fine Woodland Scenics ballast applied, while the adventurer on the left is standing in fairly rocky patch of desert which has a mix of ballast sizes applied to it.

I have a large pet food container containing three different baggies of Woodland Scenics ballast mixed in with kitty litter. I grab a pinch out of the container and scatter it over the wet base as I see fit. The permafill will form a reasonable bond with small pieces of grit, but I generally push larger pieces down lightly with the sculpting tool.

For large boulders I hand place pieces of the green marble I mentioned at the start. These will definitely have to be pushed firmly into the permafill. Once it’s dry it will form an excellent bond with any mildly textured stone. For the light MG team I’ve applied a few larger rocks around them for cover. For the other chap I’ve applied a fair amount of small gravel to his base. It looks a little ugly in the photo, but will prime and dry brush up quite nicely in the finished figure.

Once I’m happy with the figure base I put it aside to dry, typically overnight before priming the whole figure ready for painting. This technique works fine for 15mm scale figures as well, in fact my entire Flames of War NZ 2EF Rifle Company is based this way.

Hopefully this short tutorial will be useful to some visitors, comments and questions are welcomed below.

Related posts:

1. Cheap 28mm Scale Dinosaur – Pulp
2. Pulp: Lady and the Sentry

I haven’t added much since my previous post because it was my eldest son’s 4th birthday last weekend as well. I did manage to make some ladder-work made from cut and filed chicken wire. As well as simple fore and aft deck cranes make from dowel, cut bamboo skewers, sewing thread and a few brass ship building bits and pieces. Finally I applied some 1mm plasti-card around the wheelhouse windows to represent framing.

What I’d still like to do is master and resin cast doors and portholes to fill those blank spaces in the cabin walls. The steamer also needs at least one anchor which I can attach with some brass jeweler’s chain I have in my bits box. The whole vessel also has to be painted after that too which could be interesting!

Overlord and Neldoreth (the other contestents) managed to get more detailing done on their ships and I’ll be happily borrowing some of their ideas to complete mine! I’ve also nabbed a few of their photos from the forum for later reference as I often find forum posts often fade away after a while, leaving you with nothing but dead links.

Rich from Rattrap Productions was also kind enough to actually offer up prizes for the contest! Apparently he’s sending out a pack of Brigade Games ‘Tramp Steamer Crews’ to each entrant which is damned generous of him imho! Thanks Rich!

Related posts:

1. Tramp Steamer Portholes – Pulp
2. Tramp Steamer Ship Doors – Pulp

I recently picked up their MOR2 and MOR4 packs of Moroccan Nationalists because the fez and turban wearing figures would be excellent for the Pulp Egyptian/North African setting I game in. So here’s a quick review of these packs.

They arrived in two baggies inside a bubble-wrap padded envelope, which is understandable given the small size of my order. One hopes that larger orders are boxed however as this isn’t the best method of shipping metal figures via air mail. Several of the figures required some careful bending to get their weapons straight after unpacking.

The figures themselves are excellent, with no flash at all and mold lines that are barely visible. They could be painted straight out of their bags, however I’ll probably file a few of their metal plates down a touch during basing. The figures themselves don’t come with bases from Anglian, in the photos you see the standard Games Workshop bases I use for all my Pulp figures.

Sculpting wise they’re very well done with plenty of detail like ammo pouches, bed rolls and slung rifles. Their poses are all quite naturalistic and believable as you can see in the photos. There’s also a nice mix of action and more static poses in the MOR2 set, with a couple of gentlemen reloading while the others fire.

The MOR4 pack includes two prone figures firing a light machine gun. I grabbed this pack really because of these gents, although the other two ‘tank hunters’ are fine figures too, one of which is armed with a crowbar!

Scale wise here’s a comparison shot of them against an Artizan Designs DAK German in a similar pose. The Moroccans are a little slighter generally than the Artizan figures. Their weapons are also a little more finely sculpted than Artizan’s. Overall though they’re an excellent match and the ranges will happily mix. Particularly since you’d except a Moroccan fellow to be a little more wiry than a Teutonic soldier.

In summary I’d happily order from Anglian again as their figures are very well done, so into the blog-roll they go!

Related posts:

1. Review: Black Scorpion Tombstone Miniatures
2. Review: Lego Minifig Brickarms
3. Review: Pig Iron Kolony Rebel Heads

It was also an exercise in speed painting since I wanted the armored car for Tuesday night’s game. I finished it in time but we ended up postponing the game until next fortnight. Ah well, that’ll give me plenty of time to finish off the scenario and a few more figures I need too. The car was painted in a similar technique to the to EBob Opel Blitz I recently finished as well. The spade is actually from that Opel and the small canvas roll (for engine work I imagine) is sculpted from green stuff.

After priming a rust coating was airbrushed on, followed by an ink wash and a dash of Marmite dabbed on with a torn makeup sponge. The whole lot was then painted Tamiya Flat Desert Yellow from a spray can and left to dry before scrubbing down in warm water with a toothbrush. Drybrushing and detail painting followed.

I’m not entirely happy with the cannon and MG as they look a little flat, but overall it bears up fairly well for a rushed weekend paint job I think. I may go back over it and apply some paint chips and exposed metal scratches to contrast the ‘rust’ patches.

The vehicle is also missing markings of any sort for two reasons. Firstly I couldn’t find any reference photos that displayed the markings used on these light scout cars during WWII. Secondly it’s for Pulp gaming in the wierd, vaguely defined inter-war 30′s Egyptian setting I typically force everybody to game in – so Balkenkreuz might be a little inappropriate.

Related posts:

1. Review: Black Scorpion Tombstone Miniatures

I think the gentle curves on the front of the cabins and platforms works quite well, despite being something of a nightmare to create. Look carefully and you can see several pieces of plasti-card have been glued around the bottom wall of the main cabin, basically just as formers to hold the curve in place. The curve on the wheel house is held in place by the curve in the foam card roof, and all those dress makers pins you can see pretending to be rivets.

The wheelhouse is free standing and I think I’ll keep it that way because then at least you can move figures around the viewing platform easily as well as get them into the wheel house itself. The viewing platform is also removable for the same reason.

I have some basic finishing to do on the superstructure – really just gluing a few more pieces of card here and there to hide some of the uglier construction details. The smoke-stack is actually a cleaned and primed deodorant bottle. Jonathan pointed out it looks a little out of scale, but I don’t find it that bad. It may be a little tall vertically, so might get attacked with a dremel again. I plan to build simple cargo cranes fore and aft, so hopefully they’ll mask the vertical effect of that large smoke-stack.

In terms of detailing I need to master and resin cast two things: a round porthole cover and a dogged sea door which should be possible to do before the 15th of September deadline rolls around. Mind you at the moment it just seems to be myself and another British chap that are actually paying some attention to the rather informal competition! Ah well, it’s been a fun learning exercise at any rate.

Overall the vessel is passable and should be reasonable fun to game over. Painting it will be interesting though. Aaron was kind enough to give me half a spray can of satin white so I’ll probably be using that to prime the cardboard cabin areas before trying my hand at weathering them. My major concern is that the card will warp once it has some paint applied to it. I may go through the interior and apply a reasonable amount of balsa wood battens before breaking out the paint…

Related posts:

1. Tramp Steamer Ship Doors – Pulp
2. Tramp Steamer Portholes – Pulp