My gaming group has got back into Flames of War recently and I thought it was time to spruce up my North African gaming table a little more. I’ve noticed we tend to make a few little villages on my textured table with a set of 15mm Crescent Root buildings and my own homemade stone walls. So I thought it was probably time I got down to creating some roads through this rather barren desert.

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.
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After I posted a work-in-progress shot of my partially painted Flames of War DAK Panzers several people expressed an interest in the weathering technique I was using. This brief tutorial will take you through the process. Please be aware I can’t claim to have invented the technique myself, I’ve just been applying it to my 28mm and 15mm war gaming models since reading about it in Issue #6 of Model Military International, and I can confirm it works just as well in smaller scales as it does in 1:35th.

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.

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This post continues and completes the earlier part of the tutorial. Once again, I’m not an expert painter but always try to speed paint to a reasonable tabletop quality. If you recall we left the half painted Anglian Miniatures Moroccan drying after applying a chestnut brown ink wash.

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.

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The first thing I’d like to say is I am by no means an expert painter. As I’ve mentioned in previous polls I paint solely to get figures onto the gaming table as quickly as possible. With that self deprecation out of the way, here’s the second of three posts regarding painting Pulp figures for a North African desert setting. This post is a continuation from the previous 28mm Desert Basing tutorial as once you’ve based your figure, you’re ready to paint it.

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!

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As I’ve purchased a few more rounds of 28mm metal figures for Pulp gaming it’s time I started working on them. Some time ago a reader expressed curiosity about the way I speed paint my Pulp figures for the gaming table, so I plan to put together a couple of tutorials around that.

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.

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As I play more non-GW games I find the figures I’m purchasing are predominantly metals, many of which are multi-part. From past experience I’ve learnt the best way to get a good bond between two metal pieces is to pin them.

The latest arrival in my mail box is two 15mm DBA armies from Corvus Belli (thanks to Olympian Games). The Carthaginian army included a multi part Elephant which needed assembly so I thought it’d be an excellent chance to snap some shots of a little dodge I use to make pinning easy – Blu Tack!

The first photo just shows you the tools involved: a pin vise for careful hand drilling, some 0.9mm garden wire for the pin (although a paper clip works fine too), some well loved clippers to cut the wire down, super glue and of course blu tack. As an aside if you don’t own a pin vise, pick one up immediately! Next to a sharp Xacto, a pin vise is the most used tool in my paint station.

1. Drill the smaller part. Prepare the two metal parts you want to pin to your satisfaction, making particularly sure they dry fit together well.

Select one part to drill an initial hole in. I usually drill the smaller part which is going to be pinned to the larger part. In this case I’ve drilled a pin hole 3-4mm deep into the back of the Elephant’s head.

2. Blu tack the larger part. Tear off a small blob of blu tack and stick it onto the larger part where the two parts will join. Make sure you’ve really stuck the blue tack on there well – it helps if the parts are reasonably clean and grease free. I’ve pushed the blu tack into the Elephant’s neck here.

Now wet the blu tack with a bit of water from a brush washing pot, or in a pinch a lick of spit on your finger (not recommended though unless you really want to ingest lead containing pewter dust) and forcibly fit the two parts together in the final configuration you want.

3. Drill the larger part. If you carefully separate the parts the blu tack will remain stuck to the larger part, only now it will contain a very obviously nub where it has has been forced into the hole on the smaller part. If the blu tack lifts away from the larger part you either didn’t stick it down well enough, or the surface of the blu tack wasn’t wet enough. No matter, replace it and try again.

Leaving the blu tack in place, simply drill out that nub until it’s 3-4mm deep as well. Now you’ve got a pin hole in each part that will match up well for pinning.

4. Pin those parts. Take your garden wire, or paper clip and snip it down to an appropriate length. The easiest way to do this is simply fit a length into one part and clip it off a shade too long, then just clip it down until a little at a time until both parts fit together well around the pin. You want to leave the pin as long as possible because then it provides more strength to the final join.

Superglue the pin to one part, I usually pick the smaller but it makes little difference, and wait a few seconds until it’s dry. Then glue the smaller part to the larger part with a thin layer of super glue, holding the parts together firmly for a at least 10 seconds to ensure a good set. Once the glue is completely dry you should find the resulting pinned join very sturdy.

5. Done! I know I struggled with pinning for a while by simply trying to get pin holes aligned ‘by eye’ before something made me try blu tack. Some people talk about using a dab of web paint in a similar manner, but I prefer my method to be honest. Blu tack is cheap, reuseable and leaves no residue in the join at all that might effect bond strength.

Hopefully this little tutorial is of some use to somebody out there!

Continuing from our previous post about mold making…

11. Checking the mold is set.

Once you’ve waited long enough return to your mold and examine the dregs in your mixing pot. You can see in the photo I’ve peeled almost all of the dregs out in a single piece so it’s clearly fully set. Once set RTV is a very flexible vulcanised rubber that you can stretch out quite some distance before it snaps.

Since ‘Ultrasil’ has an 8 hour recommended curing time and I left this mold overnight for about 22 hours, I would expect it to be set.

12. Removing the pour box.

After rolling the Klean Klay back and saving it for another mold, peeling back the masking tape and carefully tearing the foam card walls away from the mold I’m left with this: a block of RTV clinging tenaciously to my glued down masters.

Click on the photo and you’ll see some RTV has snuck under the edges of the foam card and was stopped by the masking tape and/or Klean Klay. This shows you how easily RTV can escape from an incompletely sealed pour box. I usually trim this off with a sharp Xacto before peeling the mold away from the base.

You can also see there’s a lip of RTV standing proud from the mold bottom as well as several set drips. I cut these away when I bevel the edges of the mold with the same Xacto to make the mold bottom reasonably flat.

13. Removing the mold.

You need to be careful removing the mold from the masters because if you’re going to damage anything it’ll be now. I slowly lift the first edge away from the base and then work at rolling the mold off the masters from each side a little at a time as in the photo. Eventually the mold should release itself from your masters, popping right off. Don’t be afraid of bending the RTV mold back 90 degrees or more while doing this as set RTV is very flexible.

Some people will recommend you coat your masters with a mold release product before pouring the RTV to aid removing the final mold. As I brush on the first coat of RTV in all my molding (and this tutorial) I believe the use of mold release may be a little redundant.

However if you want to try it I’d suggest picking up a spray can of mold release. Avoid using any kind of brush on product (some tutorials I’ve seen use vaseline) as it may unintentionally add an additional brush stroke texture to your masters! We use RTV for molding because it is very good at picking up minute surface details after all.

14. Tidying up the mold.

Ah the perils of tutorial writing! While removing the mold two of the smaller masters snapped off the base, remaining in the mold as you can see.

Click the photo and you’ll also see RTV has got under a fair amount of one master edge as well. This highlights the point that there’s a trade off between really gluing your masters down to your base, sealing all their edges and actually getting them off the base ever again.

As I mentioned in the first of these posts I opt for a weaker bond with the base as I often reuse my masters later on, possibly in different layouts. However that does mean that this particular problem can occur. Fortunately it can easily be solved by popping the stubborn pieces out and then trimming away the excess RTV with a pair of fine scissors. I use both straight edged embroidery scissors (borrowed from my wife’s sewing box, ssssh!) and a curved set of nail scissors for snipping away excess RTV.

15. The finished mold.

There you have it! Your mold is ready for casting and I hope you’ve enjoyed this rather long tutorial. Feel free to post questions or comments and I’ll answer them as best I can.

If you’re considering casting your mold in a hard plaster product like Hydrostone or Ultracal 30 you may be interested in a much earlier post about the plaster casting technique I use to produce the 15mm wargaming terrain for sale on this blog. I may also publish a photo tutorial of plaster or resin casting in the future so keep an eye out.