Blood Bowl Pitch

Well, just a shortie from me at the minute, I've just received some models for a cool commission I'll be working on, but that almost pales in comparisson to the fact that blood bowl is very much back on my radar thanks in no small part to a friend putting together a very nice looking Orc team (even if the thrower is a one eyed special seemingly incapable of picking up the ball! hah!)

Working with Foamboard - Cutting Mitres

In the Foamboard Basics I covered how to mark and make straight cuts in foamboard, and I also showed you some example methods for joining these pieces. This is great for when you want to connect two pieces at right angles to each other. However, there may be times when you want to connect two sections of foamboard at an angle, or, for whatever reason, create a bevelled edge. In those cases, you will need to know how to cut at an angle.

Cutting at an angle can be absurdly tricky, but there are a number of things you can do to help makes things a bit easier for yourself.

Air Traffic Control Tower - Mk II

Regular visitors may remember that I recently started work on an Air Traffic Control Tower, the templates for which were supplied by the (probably well known) Bugbait... as found on Warseer. I know what your thinking.. "the first one is still in pieces how can you be doing a MkII?" However, not long into the process I realised that there were many things which I couldn't let pass! The base panel was not an accurately drawn shape, with odd dimensions... and the fins appeared equally drawn "by eye". I'm known for managing to fudge a finish... but you can't start off in that manner!

Working with Foamboard - Joining Basics Part 1

In the last tutorial I covered some basic foamboard principles. Namely how to mark and cut your board. As a quick addition to that, there are a number of potentially useful tools which can help you to cut clean straight lines and avoid mis-angled cuts... I have not used these tools before so will be doing some more research before providing you with more information. In the mean time though, I thought that it would be good for me to talk a little bit about ways that you can join pieces of foamboard.

If you're familiar with woodwork joinery techniques then you'll probably spot some similarities here!

Working with Foamboard - The Basics

Foamboard, otherwise known as Foamcore is an incredibly useful material thanks to the ease with which it can be shaped & glued as well as it's inherent strength which means that it is often used by modellers to build all kinds of things!

Unfortunately, whilst it is an easy material to use, it is difficult to master and there are a number of quick and simple tips and techniques to help overcome (or avoid) potential issues! Hopefully I can cover some basics here that you will find helpful, as I'm sure taking time to write this out will help me get re-acquianted!

Air Traffic Control Tower

Following getting the Landing Pad from Amera Plastics under way I decided that it could form part of a new set of themed terrain. Yea, I know, I haven't even finished ONE of the city buildings and I'm already thinking of and working on alternative board set ups! Well, I've got some ideas for putting together an airfield style terrain set, and no airfield would be complete without an Air Traffic Control Tower (ATC). If you've looked through my Inspiration Page you might have found Bugbaits Terrain Thread over on Warseer. He's made this one easy for me because he's even linked to templates in order to construct an ATC using his specs!

Battle Report! - "The Dawn of War"

I've not long finished playing the first two games using all of the tanks I've been working on as well as my terrain pieces, some of which you can see here - others you can consider as sneak peeks in the images below! The game was a 3000pt battle between my Armoured Company and Blood Angels belonging to Valar. Of course, there was much debate over who the heretic was... I've decided that my army has a Commissar in it, so it must be the Blood Angels...
So, here it is... any questions, just ask! I believe Valar will be making a video report will will answer lots of holes, I'll let you know when it's available!

Review - Amera Plastics Landing Pad & Craters

Amera Plastic Mouldings is a UK based company that produces plastic vacuum formed terrain kits. Some of these are single piece kits, but they also produce a range of multi-part models. Either way, all of their kits look incredibly reasonably priced so I was eager to get hold of some things to see what we are dealing with.

I decided to order some craters and a landing pad. Arriving well packaged and relatively speedily, both required a small amount of trimming. But nothing that a good pair of scissors couldn't sort out. If only I had a good pair of scissors!

Overall, I was very happy with the plastic moulding. My only criticism would be that some of their kits seem a little bit on the large size in terms of scaling... not by much, but enough for me to notice (though perhaps thats not fair considering my exacting eye).

However, their products are all very cost effective!

Considering the ease with which the craters can be cut and shaped, I have some ideas for how to use them, watch this space. I also have some very quick plans for painting the Landing Pad which involves the review of another product that some of you terrain builders might be interested in (assuming it comes out well!) So keep your eyes peeled.

Simples! If it's all this easy then I'll be sure to order from Amera Mouldings again! You can find them in my list of resources on the left hand side and by following the link at the start of this post.

Inspiration - Bristol Vanguard Gaming Club

Don't panic! I'm not dead! I have been utterly busy with another project to build and paint a 1750pt Imperial Guard army... I still have a lot to do with it but thus far I have avoided posting about it here because I would probably rather keep this project theme intact.

In the mean time however, I haven't been sitting idly and have been keeping a keen eye out for all sorts of inspiration. Not every gaming club has the good fortune to have a collection of awesome looking terrain. But at the Bristol Vanguard Gaming Club they have just that. In fact, not only do they have some awesome looking terrain pieces, but they have combined them into very inspirational gaming boards! Looking at the images below, and on their site I am sure that you can agree they have created some very nice themed terrain and boards, though that in itself is probably the subject of another post!

I am reliably informed by an avid member of the club that they are lucky enough to have a pair of budding terrain experts that tirelessly scratch build and paint all of their terrain pieces. Using all manner of DIY sources and structures, augmented by a range of Games Workshop bits and pieces at least in part donated by other

club members they go about their dungeon workshop to produce some of the best looking tables I have seen. Perhaps it's not just the fact that they can produce shuch nice looking terrain pieces, but that they can do this continually, and create very nice themed environments.

Whats more is that they are proud to present them on their website, and can be found here. This site will of course be making its way onto my "Inspiration" page where it belongs. And I hope to at least try to recreate some of the great features that you can see, such as the barrack style buildings!

You can also check out more detailed and awesome slideshow of their boards in action at their 2011 "Longest Day" Tournament! Definately worth a look, and I will be making a note of it for next year for sure!

Of course, the scratch building portion of my terrain building won't really kick in until after I have exhausted the majority of the kit work that I have... unless I just can't wait any longer!

Re-Education Centre Cont...

Well, Meatspace has been catching up with me recently, but work has not completely stopped. Aside from my ongoing work on my Imperial Guard I have expanded the Re-Education Centre by adding a second floor. This includes a balcony to the front. In line with my drive for "accuracy" you might think I've forgotten to provide a door out to the balcony, but the first floor doesn't extend as far as the ground floor - suggesting that the door would have been in the now ruined section. The same could be said of the stairs, and I suppose this should be taken into account when it comes to adding rubble and the like!


When adding extra parts (an entire storey in this case) it's important to keep the continuity of the story of the building. What this means is to ensure that damage flows through as you might expect. Looking at the first image below you can see the the bottom of the first floor (that's the top one because I'm not American!) has no damage, even though it sits above the quite damaged ground floor (that's the bottom one for any Americans reading!). This just wouldn't do, so I attacked the new part of the building with a pair of clippers. I think that it is this sort of minor attention to detail that is easily missed, but can make a big difference to the "believe-ability" of the buildings.

Mechanicum Supply Stores

A nice quick stand alone terrain piece to go along with the larger buildings, these storage garages are designed to provide small scatter terrain that will fit into a variety of board themes. I started by building the intact one, with the aim of creating something that would solidly block line of sight. As such it has no windows and the doors are kept shut. The roof is removable in order that you can actually get at the inside if you wanted to. The vehicle cupola and hatch should be able to fit nicely onto the hole in the roof. It is a small, simple terrain piece but will help add some variety.

The second one came along because I saw an opportunity to use some of the parts from the Tamiya kits I was buying to adorn my Imperial Guard tanks. I was accumulating a high number of barrels, so I will be placing some of them and some Jerry Cans into it to add interest and colour. I attacked the doors with a blade and they are being kept aside to be glued in an open position. This, along with the windows have been placed with a view to maintaining the idea of preventing lines of sight being drawn through the building.

Progress on these chaps should move along quite quickly and easily!

Re-Education Centre

Surely every outpost needs a Re-Education Centre. Where those with wayward thoughts or actions can be (re)schooled in the correct ways of the Imperium! Well, I thought so anyway, and got cracking on another building, still eating away at those parts in the big city boxed set, which is still posing lots of questions as to how I am going to use all of these parts! Mostly though, I just wanted to make a home for the new Brain Pump, no doubt a key piece of kit for helping those misguided individuals! As you can see, I haven't blown loads of pieces on a complicated or large plan for the building, as I want to try and make lots of buildings rather than one mega one!

I decided again that one half of the building would be mostly intact, whilst the other half would have suffered the damage, so set about the wall and floor sections with that in mind. I hadn't really thought much about what was happening on any further floors yet, so I decided to just put some balcony sections for now and work out the rest another time.

The Brain Pump fits neatly into the ground floor, perfect for fast and effecting "teaching"... no waiting.

You'll notice that the base for this building is a lot wider and this will allow me to build up rubble around the foot of the walls.

Governors Palace

With gay abandon I set about gluing together bits from the cities of death mega city boxed set! Really, I just wanted to get a feel for the different parts and how they went together and only after a bit of fiddling (with the models) did I start to formulate what the building I was making was actually going to be (or at least what it used to be). Granted this is really the backward way of doing things because if you know what a buildings use is, then you can be guided to how it looks, how wide or tall it might be and of course what needs to go inside it! As it was, this thing started life as a simle two storey ruin.

Here is the back of the thing, showing a pretty basic layout. whilst fun to build, this wasn't looking like anything particularly special, and it wasn't until I started on my second building that it really hit me - the two things should get put together into one much larger building! Every Planetary Governor needs a palace to govern from... and this was going to be just that! The best bit is that because it is made up to two separate parts (importatnly on separate bases) then I can use the buildings as two smaller ruins as opposed to one large one!

From a practical point of view the large open ground floor area should let lots of models fight over the building. Whilst the fact that the building is not complete at the rear could suggest severe damage, or further parts to the combined palace. Of course, it also helps to make the buildings more usable when they are used in two parts.

You will see that I am using plasticard for the bases of my buildings. This gives them something solid to stick on to but does not give me a tall lip as you often get with MDF basses... this should help the buildings blend into the board a lot better.

Imperial Shrine

Well, I suppose this is as good a time as any to get you guys hooked by showing you initial work on the first building:

Despite the big box of buildings sitting waiting for me, I went out and bought a pair of "Shrine of the Aquila" sets. These look really good, and a pair of them would be able to go together to make a VERY impressive church like building. It should be noted that because the walls are such large sections I found that a few were slightly bent, but nothing that a little bit of careful handy work couldn't fix! Overall, the Shrine box set are actually pretty reasonably priced and look like they have a fair amount of flexibility in their construction. Definately a worth while addition.

With this in mind, I wanted to step away from the square look, in fact, I wanted to create a largely intact Shrine to fight over so after a bit of thinking I came up with a simple floor plan design to make the most of all of the parts. I measured up and cut out two template shapes to help construct the building more interestingly. One for the floor, and one for the roof.

Here you can see the bulk of the Shrine. The large central space will hopefully house some sort of important looking artifact, relic or statue. I'm not sure what at the moment, maybe someone has some good ideas!?!

In any case, the keen eyed among you will notice that this doesn't even use a whole boxed set! You can see that even like this it would be possible to create interesting, half destroyed, shrines even if you were using only one boxed set. So, in any case you're probably wondering what happened to the rest of it!



Well here it is... This will form the front portion of the Imperial Shrine, equivalent to the main area of most modern day churches (the Nave). The front part of the Shrine will give the overall feel of a traditional church like structure - with a long approach to the main area. It also lets me put in a middle floor which will help mix things up a bit when it comes to gaming.

When the two halves are placed next to one another you get the echo of a modern day church, but importantly without the Christian style cross plan layout - as this is something which would have no reason in the 40k Universe! However, the roof was clearly in too good a shape, so I went at it with a pair of clippers, snipping and twisting to get a random effect. All of the snippings were saved for later use, even small parts went into a pile which can later be ransacked for rubble. The two collapsed sections will help you get your arm in to move models about. The two sections aren't glued toegether yet, I think I won't do that until I've painted them. There's a fair bit of work to do until then though!

Of course, there is still a lot to do on this piece of terrain, and they include:
+ Add more detailing to the roof sections - as these will form a big part of the gamers view.
+ Include something to worship! Maybe the big Space Marine statue from the GW set... maybe someone can give some other ideas!? as well as some additional internal details (someone has already mentioned adding pews scattered in the nave!)
+ I also need to add some of the external details, such as the steps, and probably some buttresses etc.
+ Then of course I will need to worry about adding rubble and painting, but these will all be done at a later stage anyway.