Thursday, August 8, 2013

More Pictures and New Terrain

Well I just got in the Battlefield in a Box Cobblestone roads. The roads are nicely painted and look good. My one gripe is the size of the cobbles that are modeled. Cobbles are supposed to be about fist sized. For a 15mm figure these cobbles are larger than their heads. Much larger.

Also as I alluded to in my last post, I have inherited some terrain. A good friend passed away some time ago. Terry Haney lost a battle with cancer. We had played a number of games together. He was a prolific gamer who had an unbelievable collection of miniatures and terrain. I was given several items from his collection. A train station, a coal yard, a ruined building and a factory were all given to me by his wife. Before he had died, he had given me a platoon of Italian Bersaglieri. He was a generous soul and a pleasant companion at the game table. I have been struggling with what to post on this for a while and I still am not sure what I should post.

Anyway, I need to move on. I have been trying to figure out how to do snow terrain without having to have more than one set of terrain. I tried using sand for snow. Anyway, this is what I came up with.

This is the Bersaglieri that Terry had given me prior to his death in front of his train station.

Here are some of my Soviets in front of Terry's coal yard. I had been eyeing this piece from an ebay vendor for a while.

You can partially see the factory that I inherited from Terry here with his Bersaglieri.

Had to move some trees out of the way for this shot. Here are some soviets defending the ruins in Gorlovko against the Italians.

And also from the Gorlovko playtest, an NCO orders his men. The ruin is another building from Terry.

All in all, I kind of like the snow effect from the sand. It provides a light dusting. It was easy to clean up. It did not stick to terrain or figures. It stuck a bit to the felt but that was not a big deal. What do you think? Does the sand work as snow?

12 comments:

  1. It looks truly snow in the photo but I can tell if the real colour is so white as it looks. Have you tried salt instead?

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    1. I thought about salt. But I was warned off of it on the Lead Adventure forum as it could potentially do bad things to terrain or minis. The sand seems to have worked out. I can get buckets of the stuff for next to nothing.

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    2. Thanks for the warning!! Just in case I was having some "good idea" in the future... :-)

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  2. woodland Scenic makes a snow flock, which works really great. I have used it on some dioramas I had.

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  3. So it is not permanent thing. It can be added and removed? I may check that out.

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  4. Yes, the Woodland scenics snow flock is a good choice. I would also ditch the green felt. The color that shows is way too "green felty" in appearance. If you're just setting up to take pictures, a split open brown paper bag would be better.
    I was so sad to hear of Terry's passing also. We certainly need to do something to honor the man.

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    1. Still waiting on your master class of creating a ground cloth Mark. :) I have a spare ground cloth that I had in my previous post. Is that any better?

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  5. The sand looks like snow indeed! I use snow from Games Workshop.
    The buildings are great to!

    Greetings
    Peter

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  6. Nice idea using sand for snow. I used white felt for a permanent snow board.

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  7. I never met Terry but we talked about my Indo-China project via email. Nice chap, sad to see him go.

    As for the sand, it works in the pics here, in my opinion. MOre of it, perhaps, I imagine snow cover gets rather thick rather quickly in Ukraine.
    http://www.5thvillage.me/gorlovka/?page_no=5&max_tag_id=1367764322320

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  8. I think the sand works well too. I think the suggestion of a browner or less green cloth would also help. I think the pictures are really good. I like the composition of them very much. I'm a little torn on the depth of field. Sometimes I like the blurring away from the focal point and sometimes I don't. This post http://clearhorizonsalvage.blogspot.com/2013/05/one-last-photo-long-dof.html shows a pretty impressive photo with a Long Depth of Field. One way he takes such good pictures is using his laptop as a monitor. I may try this technique myself.

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