Walling off the World

I spent the other evening scribing the foamcard on the outside of the walls to resemble courses of stonework. When you're making six feet of the stuff, it takes forever. I've added a little chipping to the surface so far, and pressed a couple of blocks in as though they were slightly misaligned or the wrong size, but the main thing since then has been applying 2mm foam to the back of the walls. Once that's dry, I shall scribe it. Then I just need to thicken up the battlements and add flagstones, and I can finally get to texturing and painting.

Walls with a view

The product of several hours' labour last night: five and a half feet of walls to add to the extant six inches. Gateways and the like are still to follow. I took the foamcard, cut it to shape, and glued it to the front of the walls. Now we let it set.

March/April Plans

Note: I wrote this before my last post, so don't be confused if it seems retrograde.

I have a few projects on the go at the minute. I am almost at the end of building the village, I think. The "Mosque", a small building, and a couple of large ones will round it out nicely, bringing the total of buildings, including what I think of as the Hacienda to a lucky total of thirteen structures. A ruin or two, and perhaps a few other things, may follow in due course, but for a while, that will be it.

I have three areas I want to focus on now. First, the Baccus BEF Infantry division alluded to on Monday. I'm very happy with the colour scheme for the guns, and am feeling confident about the infantry colour scheme. I should have finished it tonight, but I am too tired for sleeping, having got up early to drive almost to Hull for a friend's little boy's christening. Lovely time, but I'm shattered.

Since I'm too tired to paint I am, of course, cutting things up with sharp knives. Wisdom is for the wakeful! This is work on the second thing I shall be working on: a modular castle. I have posted ere now a teaser for one of several towers I am building. That is nicely advanced, and will fit in with a collection of walls I am at work on. I mean to have a good 6' of straight bits, and then have a think about a gateway, angled bits of walls and so on. Again, sleepiness currently impedes thinking and detailed planning.

Finally, I long ago decided to build a set of three connecting trench boards for 40K. Now, I haven't played 40K in years, and have no intention of going back to it, but I wouldn't be averse to some Great War trench action. I'd need to cover up a few oddities, which I shall. So the first step has been undercoating the old boards so I can get a good idea of what work needs to be done to start bringing them up to code.

Being Me and Building Walls

I incline toward the introspective and I have an excellent memory for many things. Combined, these two elements often produce unfortunate results. I consider at excruciating length what could have gone better had I done this rather than that, why I failed to perceive then what is so blindingly obvious now, and so forth. In terms of this blog, I have spent quite a while wondering what to do to interest people in reading it. However, I had an unrelated eureka moment the other day, and am now minded to kick out all that I had thought up. Instead, I shall be popping up photographs as and when I do things, so long as I have the time. Quite a lot is under way.

I am making a modular castle wall at the minute. I have a clear picture of most of the construction in my head. The body of the wall (on which models will stand) is 4" tall, made of thick polystyrene foam. A facing element (5.5" tall) will be glued to the outside, made of foamcard, the paper front removed, and the foam inscribed with blocks in courses. The rear of the wall will be of black foam, scribed again to produce courses of stones. Details of the battlements are still uncertain in my mind. I want them a bit thicker than they are at present, but I am unsure how much thicker. Flagstones of dark foam will sit on the battlements' floor, if you take my meaning. Some walls will have flights of steps so as to allow models access to the walls.

Here is what I am on about. I dropped the connector for my digital camera into my orange juice, so while that dries, have some pictures taken on my telephone.

January Retrospective, February Prospective

Things are looking pretty good here, so I'll focus on the positives. Although all I have posted this month is teasers for forthcoming projects, behind the scenes they are proceeding apace. On the personal front, I attended a meeting for folks with Asperger's/autism at Crewe Library. It was rather interesting, and the attendees ran the gamut of ages from teenage to twice my age, covering both genders, though with a preponderance of blokes. Silberman mentions that one of the things that made Asperger decide the condition was predominantly masculine is that women in 1930s Austria were expected to sit quietly, doing things like sewing, so there was a societal predisposition toward ignoring woman who displayed such traits. It was also striking that everybody was white. This area is pretty boringly monochrome, but the absolute absence of anybody did strike me as indicative of under-diagnosis. Again, Silberman mentions difficulties for immigrants in accessing good health care in America. While I'd hope that is less the case here, it's bound to have an effect. Anyway, I enjoyed it, and will return next month.

In further personal news, my defunct book-club is carrying on outside the library, and on a Thursday night, which is good news. So after a year-long hiatus, I should be able to get back to it. I don't do a tremendous amount of socialising, and that was a fair percentage of it until I couldn't go!

On the gaming front, nothing has happened, but the terrain work is coming along pretty nicely. I have a couple of buildings, a teaser for one of which will appear tomorrow, and the large ravine project all on the go. The different scales and styles allow me to shift focus and retain interest when one wears me out or, indeed, can't be worked on. There's always drying time to consider in this hobby! With luck, February will see me posting some finished pieces and tutorials. I am now starting to gather ideas for my next round of projects, as well as dusting off (in some cases literally) unfinished old projects for another look. More on that next month. Meanwhile, thanks for reading.

Giving in to the Dark Skies (sorry, Obi-Wan!)

Image hence.

I revel in bad puns, so expect no apology. You may recall the other week that one of the episodes I long ago recorded onto VHS was unwatchable. I wept and gnashed my teeth. My dentist tells me I shouldn't do that. Last night I resolved with sangfroid to let it pass me by. I would be as a rock in a stream. "Not breathing?" No, unbothered! Stop deliberately misunderstanding, you blackguard! I put aside the useless tape, and picked up the next one. It's useless too! It was always a problem with videos. Sometimes they'd just be dodgy, and then you were stuck with no sound or lines through the whole thing or something else designed to give you a migraine. We didn't have any of that fancy high-falutin' digital recording teck-know-low-ghee back in the '90s. Two episodes on that tape, so that's three I can't watch, plus a few I didn't record.

Bugger that for a game of soldiers. Er, no offence intended to wargamers or fans of anal sex, obviously. So in a moment of weakness I sent for the DVD. Knowledge will be mine in a few (business) days. The funny thing is that I mean to have a nostalgic weekend with some friends, contemporaries of mine, two of whom haven't heard of half the shows I remember, and quite possibly the others are just too shy of offending me to have mentioned it. My classmates at school did always say I watched too much TV. They may have been right.

Heh, of course they were. Nary a friend from school lived within miles of my house, so I just hung around indoors, getting fat, reading and watching TV. It's not too different today, except that I watch stuff on the PC as a rule. That said, I decided last week to watch an episode of Castle, since it contains Nathan Fillion, and was quite taken with it. So I'll be watching tonight's in a little under a quarter of an hour. The précis of tonight's episode is that some rich woman was murdered and then shoved inside her wall-safe.

Like the previous six, this victim was found folded neatly in half...in place inside the glove compartment of a sanitation truck.

Am I about to watch an episode of a TV show based on a throw-away background gag from Hot Shots: Part Deux? Awesome! I'll let you know. Au revoir, mes amis!