Building Whitewash City: foundations

Guy sprang a little surprise on me this week. He had asked me a while ago whether I’d be interested in taking my Tombstone stuff along to the Brighton & Clayton Warlords monthly meeting to show the lads something a bit different from their standard Warhammer Fantasy Battles fare, and of course, I said “sure”. However, owing to a cock-up by their webmaster (that’ll be Guy, then) I didn’t receive the newsletter in which it was announced that I would be doing it this coming weekend!

So, with time at a premium, I decided to whack something together that would at least be presentable for a game of Legends of the Old West, but which would also serve my own gaming in the future. Many Legends games are played over a small, square area, so a quick trip to the local Homebase store led to me acquiring a couple of 3mm thick 4′ x 2′ MDF boards, which you can see here adorned with a quick paint job. I used a textured exterior wall paint in a creamy/beige colour as the basecoat, followed by a series of three aerosol spray paints in patches: Plasti-Kote super satin chocolate brown first, followed by grey beige from the same company; and finally a Holts Auto Spray in Nevada Beige. By spraying from different heights and directions, and with more or less pressure on the nozzle, I obtained the patchy, mottled look you can see. Not bad for about an hour’s work from start to finish.

I did this up here in the Loftwaffe with all the windows wide open, which helped the textured acrylic paint to dry very quickly and get rid of the stench of the aerosols!

The buildings are the first of Eric Hotz’s “Whitewash City” set that I bought a while ago. I got the ‘Pioneer’ starter set, which will set you back all of a mere $15.99, which for a UK gamer makes just £8 for 15 structures at current exchange rates, and of course you can print them out and alter them as many times as you like. These downloadable PDF buildings were first printed onto normal A4 paper, then spray-mounted (using PhotoMount, in fact, which is somewhat stronger) onto old breakfast cereal packets before cutting out and folding as instructed. Take your time, score all the folds, and the result is really quite impressive, as you can see. I would say that those uprights on the porches need reinforcement, so I’m going to cut some thin strips of either very thin plywood or stiff card and glue them behind the facades to add rigidity. The final task will be to run a bit of paint down the edges where you can see the white card along the folds and edges of cutout pieces. One other thing you might like to consider is substituting short lengths of thin dowel for the stove pipes, rather than using the rolled artwork provided, which proved to be a tad tricky. Job done!

I’ve also got black fingers from undercoating a load of barrels, crates, log piles and horse troughs that I picked up from Frontline Wargaming at the Redoubt show in Eastbourne last weekend. These are resin jobs, very light and extremely competitively priced. A few of the barrels in my batch suffered from quite a lot of flash and air bubbles, but a bit of filing and filling and they’re as good as new. I’ll put up pictures of these once they’re done.

Objects like these are really useful in any Wild West game, both to make the game look more attractive and to create hiding places and cover for the characters in the game: they become things ‘in the way’ of shooting, making for greater tactical interest.

I shall also be taking along bits of wall, lichen and so on to add to the scene. The one thing I haven’t got yet is fences — I can see this being a major balsa wood project unless I manage to find some commercially-made ones!

Anyhow, there’s enough stuff now to make for an exciting scenario that can be run several times on the day with different players and, as it happens, there will be some Wild West stuff in the next issue of Battlegames, so this stuff is coming together just in time for a photoshoot.

I’ll let you know how it goes on Sunday.

Whitewash City project part 1 complete

Good grief! This doesn’t happen very often! I’ve actually completed painting my first couple of sets of Black Scorpion Tombstone figures. This was prompted by Guy coming round on Saturday for his first game of Legends of the Old West. I had done a very late shift on Friday night in an attempt to get the minis finished in time for the game; alas, it was not to be, but they were certainly looking good enough for the session, which turned out to be tremendous fun.

We did a simple ‘jailbreak’ scenario. Billy the Kid was locked up in a central building, with the remaining scenery as described in the Legends book, a few town buildings to the west, a wood to the north east, and a stream running across the southeastern table corner. Guy was playing the sheriff and his chums, whilst I had a small band of baddies who were attempting to free the kid.

The game was fast, furious and funny. With only three of the sheriff’s men on the table at the outset (and no reinforcements arrived until about move 6!), I was confident that my guys would be able to take out the opposition in short order, free the Kid and ride off into the sunset. However, I had not reckoned on Guy’s ability to jinx my men. Time after time, I drew the high card for getting ‘the drop’ on him (i.e. taking the initiative in the move), but my men’s ability to shoot straight appeared to have deserted them. Most humiliating of all, having finally managed to kill one of the jail’s guardians, I rushed the building, and one of my shotgun-armed men kicked open the door and loosed a blast — completely missing his target! Next move, justice was served on this useless tough, and I actually thought “good riddance!”

Once Guy’s sheriff and other helpers arrived on the scene, it was only a matter of time before my merry men were reduced to the solitary John Chisum wielding his Winchester, and though he hung on longer than was decent against four defenders, even his Pluck gave out in the end, and he skedaddled, with Billy the Kid’s furious insults rining in his ears.

We didn’t take any photos of this game, but there will be more, so in the meantime, here are a few pics of the figures now that they are completely finished and I’ve done the bases.

These figures were painted using a Dallimore-style method, working up from a black undercoat. I mostly used Foundry colours for this, with GW metallics. The bases are a mixture of sand, with Woodland Scenics talus for bigger rocks. This layer was then painted in GW Scorched Brown, over which I added successively drier-brushed layers of Foundry Base Sand shade, Base Sand, and then a very dry brush of Base Sand light on the rocks. Vegetation is Woodland Scenics: natural lichen for the tumbleweed/parched bushes, coarse Burnt Grass in patches, then a few bases have some sprigs of that damn fiddly fine horsehair grass stuff! Nearly drove me nuts.

I’ve bought another of the Tombstone sets, and one of Mexican bandidos, and some unridden horses. I would be really happy if Black Scorpion got around to making riding equivalents of all their figures on foot, which seems glaringly obvious to me as a requirement! I’d also like to see them creating many more non-combatant characters, civilian bystanders and so on. I admire their human sculpts enormouosly, and whilst their horses could do with some improvement in the head department, they are extremely characterful.

I’m very pleased with the results so far, especially considering the fact that this is the most detailed painting I’ve done in a long time, which has also led to me realising that I’m suffering from precisely the syndrome that Mike Siggins described in one of his Forward Observer columns in BG a while ago . It’s as though, at times, I’ve borrowed someone else’s eyes, and they don’t quite work properly! This may be a side effect of painting dark colours over a black undercoat as well, and I may have to revert to a paler undercoat. There are moments when the tip of the brush just seems to simply disappear completely, which is rather unnerving.

Oh dear, I’m getting old!