Oblivion - The Lava Flows On

I made some more lava hexes.

Here they are alongside some standard Hexon II tiles.

I think I'll make some intermediate tiles to blend in the 'join', so to speak.

The 'join' is a bit abrupt.

The archers seem unwilling to advance, depending on their arrows to dominate the lava field.

These are GW Empire plastic archers painted in a variety of house colours and form part of my humanoid fantasy army. The painting style is semi-old school, block painting finished with a coat of nut brown ink and matt varnish. The bases are magnetised.

Oblivion Landscape

One of the things my late chum did before he died was to donate his Hexon 2 collection to me. This was a marvellous gesture on his part as Hexon 2 is not cheap although it is very good at what it does.

Unfortunately he had bought blank hexes and had applied his own terrain finish. This was OK but they didn't match any of the flocked sets I already had. No problem, I thought, as I had planned on making up some hexes with special features to use with our Sci-Fi and Fantasy games.

I stripped one of the single hexes bare and then applied a lava field effect taking my inspiration from a PC game called Oblivion.

The darker segments are just corrugated cardboard cut into shapes, glued down and topped with a plaster and then sand finish. Finally a paintjob produced the effect I was looking for.

Here is a 28mm Sci-Fi trooper for scale.

I think I may make more of these.

Ready, The Tufts

Since I am painting British infantry for the Peninsular War I thought I would do a couple of mounted officers to tag along with them. This was helped by my friend having started one already.

Here they are:

One of these is entirely my own painting. Can you tell which?

This is one of his!

And this is one of mine!

Here they are together again, with Tufts!

 A nice pair!

Now for another battalion.
 

Ready, The Buffs

One of the incomplete collections I found amongst my old chums boxes was a large number of Victrix British Peninsular infantry, a few painted, some part painted, some part assembled and some still on sprue. Quite a few in fact, about four boxes worth.

It looks like he was planning on at least a brigade of infantry and had made a start, six figures to be precise. I endeavoured to complete at least some of them and this is their story.

My chums painting style is a bit different to mine but I made a best effort to copy his.

Here is my effort on the left, matt varnished and his on the right, unvarnished and a little bit glossy.

Can you see much of a difference?

I started with figures freshly washed in soapy water and mounted on painting sticks.

A black undercoat follows.

Then a fairly hefty dry-brush of white.

This, as you can see, brings out a lot of detail but it is important to leave a bit of shadow.

The next set of stages is to block in, carefully, all the other colours, starting with red for the jacket and flesh tones for face and hands.

Keep these stages going until all the coloured areas are done. Then I used a black lining pen to highlight various shadows and delineate items like the white cross belts.

The last stage of my chums technique is a colour wash/varnish which I found in a sealed jar. Its composition is unknown to me but I expect that it is a combination of a clear acrylic varnish and a grey-ish colour.

After that coat is dry then it is a simple matt varnish exercise followed by standard basing. They now look like this.

Rather smart, don't you think? Certainly ready for battle.

On parade are His Majestys 3rd (East Kent) Regiment of Foot, "The Buffs".

Grenadiers on the right of the line.

Light Company on the left, singly based just in case they need to skirmish.

Just another three and a bit boxes to go.

And if you can't wait for me to get them into action on my tabletop I can't. It still looks like this.