Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

Well darn it, we're a third of the way through 2026 already.  April has been a bit less stressful month than March real world wise, just steadily working through my stuff. April always means Salute for me and you can read my thoughts on the show here .  The end of April is also where I take stock of my progress in the year to date.  You can see how I've been doing with my projects here and with gaming here . Completed Here's what I completed during the month: 20mm Platoon 20 French Indo-China War Vietnamese.  I completed four pairs of porters, a mule team and the artillery crew this month.  Porters and mules were a vital part of the Vietnamese war effort.  They add something a little different to the table and they've come out rather well.  I based the recoilless rifle and all the crew on small magnetised bases then made a base out of magnetic receptive sheet as I'd done for my Ancient Germans and Imperial Romans.  This gives me the flexibility of...

March has been a very disjointed month.  We were away for a week in Malta.  Unfortunately, both before we went and on our return there's been some serious family medical business to attend to and normal life has been very disrupted.   I've been left to my own devices for quite a bit of the month, so from the hobby perspective it's been a good month.  To be frank though most of it has been rubbish.  The importance of being able to sit quietly and focus on something that you have control over should never be underestimated.  Completed Here's what I completed during the month: 6mm Iran-Iraq War afvs.  I based up the last four vehicles I'd painted last year.  I'd held off on these as I did consider using them for the Soviet-Afghanistan project but decided they'd be better for the IIW.  I also found a Command stand that just needed the ground texturing so I did that too. 20mm Platoon 20 French Indo-China War Vietnamese.  These were...

I've been fully focused on my WW2 Italian Campaign project this week. Painting/modelling   I finished the bases makeover of the Allied part of my Italian Campaign collection which you can see here . I based my poplar trees.  These were the last trees that needed basing from the job lot I bought many years ago and based last year ( see The Great Tree Project posts ).  I used the same basic methods described in these posts, but with the colour palette I'd used for the Italian Campaign figure bases,  Algerian War figures and Mediterranean hills and scatter that I've been working on in 2022.  I've started improving my collection of 15mm Spanish buildings, which I'm using as generic Mediterranean buildings.  These are all Empires at War MDF that I built a few years ago.  Nice buildings overall, but there's always improvements you can make on MDF kits and that's what I'm going to be working on.  These will be my focus for a couple of week at least ...

After completing the first batch of woodland scatter I very quickly knocked up another batch.   The steps are described in the earlier post, so I won't repeat them here.  The only change I made was to paint the whole of the base including the edges with the Leather Brown colour as soon as the sand was dried.  By taking a bit more care with the drybrushing, I didn't have to do this at the end like I did with the first batch. That's a total of eighteen pieces made over only the last 4 or 5 days.  These have been good to fit in whilst working as you need to allow time for the various stages to dry, so you can do a bit before work and it'll be ready for the next stage when you get home.  They're going to make my woodland games look much better.  

Taking a break from the Sikh Wars project I decided to make some scatter pieces to complement the tree bases I'd made last year. I spend a lot of time walking or running in mixed deciduous woodland and there's much more to a wood than trees.  Much of the greenery is from the understudy community of numerous plants and I wanted to simulate this.  As these pieces didn't need any strength I decided to make the bases out of EVA foam sheets.  It's more or less weightless, takes paint and scatter material well and can be cut with scissors.  Therefore it's quick to work with. I always paint the sheets with cheap craft acrylic paint to begin.  I think it gives a better starting surface. After cutting out the basic shapes and bevelling the edges with scissors, I covered each shape with PVA and added my usual sand mix.  They were left to dry overnight. Next stage was an undercoat of Dulux matt emulsion that I'd had mixed up to match Vallejo Leather Brown.  Once ...