One Tile Down, Twenty-three to go

So it took a while, and the last wash is still drying, but the first tile in my modular trench table is finished. Now I only have to make 23 more. Even at one a week that is 23 weeks and that doesn’t even count all the time I spent already, especially doing research. I scoured the internet for bits and tutorials. I bought books, I’m going to see a few movies, but basically I got it right, not historically perfect, but good enough.

Things to improve, more grit. I will put beach sand over most of the tile next time. Cat liter can bunch up and not let scatter terrain sit on it very well, but beach sand, nothing I make is going to be so delicate that it can’t sit on top of beach sand. I’ll still have the really fine sand for some spots, but their won’t be bare foam showing like on this tile. I drybrushed it, but the grittier stuff takes the drybrush better. I could do a heavier drybrush but I’m trying to get better at drybrushing not worse.

I wish I would have put another piece of battlefield debris by the crater I carved into the tile. That didn’t come out as nice as the ‘bought’ craters, but it may be cover-able with scatter terrain, if not on this tile then on some other.  The other option is to put a lot more grit, maybe even some foam or cork. I bought some scrap cork the other day, as part of my two dollar expenditure at the strange craft store on Main Street.

The next tile won’t be done for a while. I need to finish off my army for this years Astronomi-con Vancouver. I think I need to paint five more guys, a couple rank and file and my HQ. I put enough effort into this tile, hopefully I get better. I plan to thin the Terra Cotta paint next time, this time I just put it on pretty much out it came out of the container.

One last thing I tried out was some pigments I got off of AwesomePaintJob.com, this was a bit of an impulse buy, as I already had some pigments, but I was big into trying out new techniques, and one I’ve never used much is pigments. I also mixed into my rust mixtures, Rust Brown Ink, water and later, the Foundation Orange. I’ve tried out a lot of new, small, one person hobby companies, after reading about them on Table Top Gaming News or elsewhere.

Paint it Black

Yep, the most overused title in the miniature painting hobby. This is actually really important, having made several display bases, nothing cramps your style while doing the final details like pink or white foam poking through. So this rather large undertaking I vowed to paint it black early and paint it black often.

I’ll paint some more black on these but first I’ll probably put down the timbers inside the trenches. After that is done I’ll do the sand. I don’t want to sand all the flat surfaces and I can’t use as much cat liter as I did on my GT display base, it looked good but it isn’t game-able. This table needs to game-able, that means wider than usual trenches, modularity, less than perfect fits, and lots, and lots of little pieces that can be re-arranged.

Someday I’ll get my other table’s worth of terrain here in Vancouver. I plan to make a lip to connect the two. I was thinking of doing a ruined village after this, something vaguely French and World War One. I’ve also considered Spanish Adobe style buildings or even an Ork Village, but lately seeing the stuff Pardulon is producing if I ever have the money to drop on a gaming table again, plus the time and energy seeing this one is barely started, I might do a shanty town. Maybe only a 4*4 Shanty town…

Here’s some pics. I plan to work on just one tile at a time after this, plus I plan to work on my army for Astronomi-con Vancouver. Note I tested the biggest GW base, the one used by Imperial Guard weapons teams, they fit in the biggest trenches. I plan to make some machine gun nests and some of them will be big enough to accommodate these 80mm bases, but not all. I want my table to favor lone models on a single 25 mm base. Painting even six tiles took up my painting table, all my counter space, and my stove…

Trench Table Beginnings

One of my long schemed for mega projects is a dedicated gaming table more befitting of my tendency to play almost exclusively Warhammer 40,000. Of course by play I mean occasionally attend a local tournament, say two a year, with one or two in-store games. I think you play more when you can host, and in order to host you need a reasonably sized place and table plus terrain.

I have over a table worth of hills and forrests plus some rocks and the odd building, but with the success of one of my tournament display boards and the amount of stuff you can buy online, I decided to build a really nice table and I decided to make it a modular trench table. I did a lot of research, I collected a lot of resin scatter terrain and bits I would need to build my table, but time and energy proved ellusive.

Recently unemployed I’ve worked on my dream table, but I discovered my hobby foam cutter couldn’t handle the big thick foam I wanted to work with and it was hard to make long perfect cuts. I bought a jab saw along with a couple metal squares, but I had to give up on perfection. Working on terrain pieces takes a lot more space and makes a lot more mess than painting another squad of plaguemarines.

Undaunted I’ve pushed on. I was originally going to make one or two squares at a time, but in order to get a decent fit and to better lay out the scatter terrain I ended up cutting and carving almost one entire defensive line before I painted anything. My plan is to paint the white and pink black. Then I plan to line all the trenches sides and bottoms with little bits of wood. This is historically accurate and although this table will probably get used mostly for 40K, there is no reason it can’t serve for World War One or even World War Two in a pinch.  I plan to paint up some Germans and Van Doos someday.

I painted one test dude, you can see him making sure the firing platforms are the right height. I made my trenches deeper than most and wider than I intended. The first square I did was the angle one and three inch wide openings and then drawing the lines looked too narrow. I want to be able to fit 40mm bases in my trenches along with the planks and firing positions and some scattered stuff. I’ll make some narrower trenches eventually, but the two initial defensive lines will be bigger than scale to make it easier to game.

Almost all the scatter terrain will be loose and thus can be rearranged along with the tiles. I’ll make a dozen or so extra tiles eventually, but to start I’m make 24 carefully planned tiles. I need to switch shortly to finishing up my Astronomi-con Vancouver army, so this table will not be at Astro Van this year.

All the resin terrain shown on the tiles so far was made by Snapdragon (Moondragons.com) he stopped making them due to injury so I bought rather more than I needed, just before he went out of production, as I thought it would just make things look better. Other companies I’ve ordered from are listed here.