Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

As I've got the number of unpainted figures down to a very manageable level, I'm getting more time to work on terrain.  I'd been meaning to make wooded areas suitable for 6mm games for a while now and chose that as February's terrain project.   I was inspired by a video from that wargaming stalwart and all-round decent fella, Big Lee Hadley of Big Lee's Miniatures Adventures.  If you're thinking of doing similar I recommend watching Lee's video .  I thoroughly recommend Lee's YouTube  channel and his blog . The materials I used were: MDF bases; scourer pads; 2.5 mm diameter dowelling; scatter/clump foliage material; static grass; flock; sand mix; super glue and PVA glue.  Here's the steps: 1. Prepare the bases.  For the test piece I used a 90x52mm sized 3mm deep oval base.  I'd roughly bevelled the edge of each base using a Stanley knife with a tough blade and  then sanded each edge to increase the bevel when I'd made the winter trees (...

Something I've been meaning to do for ages is to add some winter trees to my terrain collection.  Very much motivated by reading about the combat in Hungary in the last winter of the Second World War I got on and did it. Two things enabled this.  The first was picking up a dirt cheap Christmas tree ornament for only £1.49, the second was being sent a free pack of suitable bases from the lovely people at Warbases as part of their marvellous Helping Hands initiative.  The bases were the real catalyst.  They were waiting for me when getting home from work on Monday afternoon and I did steps 1 and 2 that evening.  I did nothing on the Tuesday and worked on them for 15 minutes here and there during the day to finish them on the Wednesday doing steps 3 to 7.  Here's the steps: 1. Prepare the trees.  Using a pair of snippers I cut each branch as low as possible from the ornament.  This gave me 20 trees.  I also gave each tree a good hard brushing to...

Introduction When I originally bought my 15mm Cromarty Forge Early Imperial Romans and Ancient Germans, I intended to use them for Infamy, Infamy and therefore ordered the correct amount of figures for starter forces.  However, even then I didn't want to be held to a particular game system and I'd decided to base the figures as flexibly as possible.  In reality this meant basing them individually.  And then Midgard came along.  This post details how I have based them to take into account these two rulesets.  Planning I'd tried a number of base sizes and eventually settled on 12.5 mm square bases for all melee (for want of a better definition) troops.  This was large enough so I could still pick the figure up by the base if needed, but still meant they looked relatively tight as a unit.  I used 15mm round ones for all missile troops and characters (leaders, standard bearers etc).   In Infamy, Infamy regular Roman units are based in groups of t...

In preparation for my first game of Midgard, which was to be a Punic Wars battle, I wanted to add a bit more interest to my table.  I'd be using my Savannah battle mat, but as the battle was to be set in Iberia, I wanted to add some patches of grass. My Punic Wars collection is 10mm so I wanted the patches to sit low on the table.  I did look at cutting up a fleece blanket but that seemed a lot of effort.  I'd still have to add colour to it and it wouldn't sit that flat.  My little 10mm warriors would look like they were wading through the jungle!  I thought about returning to one of my favourite materials, old credit cards, but I didn't need much stability in these bases.  It was then that I thought of using gaffa tape. I had the remnants of an old roll sitting around so I cut a section off and shaped it.  It's so sticky that you do have to use decent sharp scissors.  Once I'd cut out the sections I dipped them in a container of sand to see how w...