25mm Minifigs SYW Army

 

Finished rebasing my 25mm Minifigs SYW French.  This is the last of the large collection I bought last year that is now all rebased and supplemented with some figures from Ian Hinds.

total of 12 Infantry, 2 cavalry 2 guns and 10 commanders.  I need to add more cavalry and arillery but will supplement with Austrians for now. 

Housing Estate

 

Hope you all had a good Christmas.  

I managed to get the other 15 houses cut and assembled over Christmas.  Just the 10 special buildings to design now.

Also worked on cutting extra road sections and working out how the siege lines are going to work.

Next up is undercoating all the houses and painting them.

I also want to get all the part-painted French defenders finished and make a start on their artillery and crews.

Back to Dendermonde

 

Putting together the full Dendermonde table so I can work on the houses over Xmas and also work out exactly how the siege lines are going to fit and how long I need to make the parallels, etc.  Also where the roads are going to go and where they cross the Glacis.

The white paper represents the special buildings like the Brewery, churches, hotels, etc that still need designing.

I also have another 15 houses to assemble and add to the table.

Dendermonde Glacis finished

 

Finished flocking the Dendermonde Glacis this morning and it is now drying.  Just need to dry-brush the walkway and it is done.

That means there is just a wooden walkway to build from the demi-line to the glacis, the Sluice Gates to build and the Gatehouse to finish painting.  Then the fortifications themselves will finally be finished.

Town boards finished

Some more progress this week on Dendermonde.  I have finished painting the town base boards and also finished texturing and painting the citadel.

I also have finished the test Glacis piece which uses the railway vinyl mat and then flock for the grassed slope.

Next up is texturing all the glacis pieces and then painting them and adding the grass.  I also need to paint the causeway.

I laid out some paper cut into the standard sizes I am using for buildings out on the town board - might have to order some more MDF!

I have started on designs for 3 storey houses as well.

Cobblestones and Dendermonde

 

Spent some time today finishing off a couple more bits for Dendermonde.  I have covered the city area with XPS foam cobblestone tiles.  I need to decide if I am going to fill the gaps or just dry brush them which will help disguise the lines  (they will also have a brown wash to stop everything looking quite so grey!) - it seems to work okay on my Frostgrave terrain.

I have also applied card cobblestones to the road running along the city wall and gateway.

Finally, I have added some polystyrene to represent the rock that the Citadel sits on and that enables me to create a small sunken ditch around the citadel which will be flooded.

Next step is to paint the rock and the citadel (when it stops raining so I can undercoat the citadel - it has been textured.).

I have also textured a small piece of glacis so I can paint it and then try adding the vinyl mat grass to see what it looks like before I tackle the larger pieces.

Reorganising the Workbench

I have been struggling for a while with switching between projects for painting and basing and finding everything to do with the modelling side of the hobby.  Stuff is stored in various different places and I often find myself searching several drawers and boxes for certain tools or paints, etc.

My painting desk has been a bureau that I inherited from my parents which I first adopted when my painting area was in my games room and I wanted to be able to close it up and ignore customers orders when I wasn't working.

It worked well, but it has a very small work area and thus for basing I was using other tables and also couldn't store all the tools, glues, etc in one place.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and do something about this.  I have had my eye on the Hobbyzone modular workbench sets for a while and decided to take the plunge and order some to see how well they worked and what size drawers would be useful.

They have a wide range of paint racks, drawer sets, sprue holders, etc available. I don't need paint racks as my paints are already in racks which were on top of the bureau.  Now the painting area is in the hobby room rather than the games room I have been able to place them on the windowsill.

I ordered 3 different drawer sets (2,3,and 6 drawers), the sprue holder, the paper towel holder and the tool and brush holder.

They are produced using a CNC machine rather than laser cut and are built from 6mm MDF with holes for magnets which hold them securely to each other.  They are thinner 2mm mdf drawer fronts and backs, etc.

The instructions are pretty good and I watched a couple of videos first before tackling the modules.

You need to remove the CNC tabs that hold the pieces togetehr first but then it is simply a case of assembling the pieces in the suggested order using wood glue.  I used Gorilla woodglue which dries in about 30 mins and taped everything together with masking tape while it dried.

I enjoyed putting these modules together and found them quite satisfying to assemble.

The end result:

As you can see, the painting desk is now larger (5' x 2') and well organised with stuff within easy reach which I hope will remove some of the frustrations I had been feeling.

I am looking at adding 2 corner units with 2 open shelved paint racks on them to hold the glue, varnishes, etc.