So how do you play over the internet? Well, we decided to use a video chat (via Skype) to simulate sitting across the table from the other player. We took a few minutes to connect to a video chat and sat our computers across from us and aimed the cameras at the playing field. This way we could each see the other person’s cards as if they were actually sitting across from us.

Just Getting Started

The quality on our cameras was not great so we could not read all of the text on the cards, but at the very least we could see the images and positioning of the cards, as well as any tokens/counters. One thing that we did was read off the title and if necessary the text of any cards coming into play so the other player knew what we were playing and simply ask the other player what a card was or what the effects were if we needed to. If you are not familiar with all of the cards you could keep open something like CardGameDB to look up the full text on cards pretty easily.

Close Up View of the Laptop... with glare.

While this may not have been perfect, we managed to get the experience of physically playing cards while sitting 50 miles from each other. It is not quite the same as getting together with some friends to play games but I would call it a great success! I think this is a great thing for people like myself who do not know many players nearby but like physically playing games instead of using virtual materials.

Later in the Game

There are a few other things to consider if you are going to attempt this. Both players need a laptop or PC with a webcam somewhere with enough space to play cards and sit the computer across from them. There is the problem of players being able to cheat off camera, but this should not be an issue if you are playing with people you know. If you do play with random strangers you could institute rules that you may not move any cards outside of the visibility of the camera or something similar to less the possibility of someone cheating.

I look forward to trying this out again. I would even like to try it out with some new people, so if anyone is interested maybe send me an email and we could try it out.

Sicarius

If you’ve been to the Tabletop Geeks member galleries then you have probably seen some of Sigur’s work. He has definitely done some very great miniatures. However, he’s done more than just paint some miniatures, he’s been putting up painting guides to go along with some of them as well! These guides are excellent and a great way to pick up some new painting techniques for yourself. I highly recommend checking out both Sigur’s site and the painting guide

This latest painting guide shows off techniques used by Sigur to paint up Ultramarines Captain Sicarius. The guide takes you from start to finish with plenty of pictures along the way! While this guide is showing off one specific miniature a lot of the techniques used, especially the shading, can be applied just about anywhere. It ends with a beautifully painted miniature. Don’t take my word for here, check out these pictures of the finished model.

Captain Sicarius

Captain Sicarius Back

Of course this isn’t the first painting guide that Sigur has posted. A while back he also did a Dark Elf Black Guard Musician painting guide. Thanks to Sigur for his great guides and thanks for hosting them on Tabletop Geeks!

If you want to check out more of what Tabletop Geek members have been up to, don’t forget to check out our Tabletop Geeks member galleries or even sign up for our own site!

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If you’re like me, you probably blamed your crappy miniatures pictures on a bad camera. It turns out that the problem for me wasn’t the camera, but how I was using it. There are a lot of changes you can make to the way you take pictures to make them turn out the best they can. This guide will teach you how to tweak your camera and surroundings to improve your pictures. The big points from the guide for me were:

• Turn on macro mode. Almost all digital cameras have them these days.
  

  My improved photo skills

• Changing the white balance setting. This will help make sure the colors are correct.
• Use a timer! I could never figure out how to stop the shakiness of my hands, but simply setting a 2 second timer, pressing the button and removing your hand will remove all possibility of shakiness. A tripod also helps for this.
• Use Picasa for touching up the photos.

The other big thing that’s really helped out is creating a lightbox for myself. Good lighting is something I always struggled with. After finding a DIY Lightbox guide I tossed one together. It made a huge difference in the photos.

After putting my own lightbox together I found out that you can buy small ones perfect for miniatures… and they come with lights and a tripod! I just picked up the Portable Photo Studio from ThinkGeek.com. It’s reasonably priced, it’s collapsible for easy storage, and it includes everything I need for taking pictures (except the camera). There are also plenty of other alternatives.

Yet another view of the final cobblestone

Well, after some more messing around with the cobblestone I think we pretty much have the method figured out. While I really liked the last piece from the last post I felt like there was something missing. At the suggestion of my girlfriend I decided to try mixing in some blue and that seemed to do the trick. A little bit of blue mixed in with the gray gave it that extra nudge away from simple grayscale and made it look really nice.

I’ve been testing out various methods with the blue to see which one works best. I’ve found that washes on the cobblestone don’t seem to work all that well, probably because the imprint isn’t all that deep. The trick seems to be drybrushing, lots and lots of drybrushing. It also helps to rough up the surface a little bit first to give it more texture and make the drybrushing work better. I’ll do a short “how-to” on the methods I used for the final cobblestone if you want to try this on your own.

UPDATE: I should probably note that the colors are done, but we’ll probably be adding bits of grass/weeds in the grout and other small details later as well.

Various Tests

First, I messed around with some ideas on the old block from before. I tried out a few more grayscale methods and then added some blue over top of them.The top left was drybrushed with blue. The top middle and right middle have blue washed over them with a thick wash.

Some blue testing

This was the other side of the previous block. We based it black, drybrushed a bunch of various blues, and then tried some washes and other things on top of it.

Black Base

Before doing any painting I stamped the foam with our stamps. Then I went over the pattern with a marker to solidify the imprints. Any thin object can be used to press down the foam and fix up messed up sections. I use a marker because it makes it easier to remember what pieces I’ve done already. There’s more on that here. After the pattern is ready, it’s time to paint the base black. This gives it a good dark base to build on.

Blue-Gray Wash

The next step is to do a thick wash with a dark blue-gray. This gives a good solid base for the rocks that doesn’t feel so bland as pure gray. Using blue works well for a cool color scheme. If you want a warmer color scheme you could probably use a brownish base instead.

Begin Drybrushing

After the wash is dried it’s time to start drybrushing. I started with a medium gray here, and then added a slightly lighter gray on top of that.

More drybrushing

After doing a couple different shades of gray, it helps to top it off with a light pure white drybrush.

Second Attempt

The last method worked pretty well for a nice uniform looking set of rocks. However, it also helps to have variety. In the middle section here I started by using a medium gray to drybrush over the full section to paint.

Random drybrushing

I mixed up some lighter gray and drybrushed over a few random pieces of this section.

More random drybrushing

To add some variety I did the same random drybrushing but with a light shade of blue.

White drybrushing

After a couple sets of drybrushing random sections with various colors I topped the whole thing off with a white again. It’s hard to see in these pictures because everything is so bright, but the middle section looks a let more random and less uniform. There are rocks ranging from pure gray to a solid blue-gray.

Adding in marker for the grout

Finally, I use marker to trace over the grout to darken it up some and make it more distinguished from the stones themselves. It also lets me push on the imprint some again to ensure a nice deep, lasting imprint. In the pic above I only markered the bottom pieces of the painted sections so you can see the difference. I’ve put several more pictures of the final cobblestone below because I had some trouble getting the lighting right to really show off the middle section.

Another final view

Yet another view of the final cobblestone

And one more for comparison

Well, I think that just about wraps up the cobblestone saga. We have a good solid base for all of our blocks now. It’s time to start planning out specific blocks and building actual terrain pieces. We have a lot of cool ideas to try out for terrain pieces, so check back soon for buildings, details, and finished blocks. I’m also going to be converting some miniatures for my Possessed army using various Warhammer and 40k models, so I’ll post up pictures of those as well.

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Building!

I finally got around to working on foamcore buildings! In a few hours last night I was able to get the first story of a simple building put together using foamcore, matchsticks, and popsicle sticks. I still need to add some stuff to it, including some framing, and it will need to be painted of course. I was going to use some of the new cardstock printouts as base templates for my building, but after fiddling with getting them printed out I decided I would just try it by making my own pattern. I’m pleased with the progress I made so far, though the popsicle sticks didn’t want to cooperate last night.

For those of you playing along at home, here are the materials I used:

Foamcore board
Matchsticks
Popsicle Sticks
White Glue
Craft Knife
Tape Measure (for measuring to make my pattern, you can also use a template)
Pencil

The Materials

The first thing I did was trace out the pattern to cut out. I used the tape measure to measure out three 4″x2″ sections, and then cut one edge short to make it look ruined. I decided on 2″ tall because of the climbing rules for Mordheim… 2″ is about right for a single story (and it’s the size of one story on the official cardboard buildings that came with the box set). You can also just print out some patterns and and trace them instead.

Tracing the pattern

After tracing… cut out the pattern. For the corners you can either cut them clean off and attach them later with glue or do as I’ve done below. I cut the corner piece, but not all the way through. Then I was able to simply bend the foam and it was all still attached. I just need something to fill the gaps in the corner now, which I’ll probably end up doing by putting some sort of wooden framework with matchsticks or something similar.

The pattern after it was cut out

The folded building

After I got this set up I realized that the one side looked weird with a full wall with nothing attached to it. I decided to just trim it down some to look like another ruined wall.

After trimming the wall

Next up was adding some doors and windows to the building. I didn’t have a lot of space so I decided to go with a single door and a single window. I traced out exactly where I wanted them and what sizes before doing any cutting.

Tracing the door and windows out

Doors and windows cut out!

Standing with doors and windows cut out

After that I grabbed some matchsticks and cut them down to make frames for the door and window. The matchsticks worked perfectly for this.

Window and door frame

That was pretty much it for the first story. I went to work on figuring out how to do the second story floor. I considered cutting out another piece of foam for the floor, but decided to try out popsicle sticks for a wooden floor. I put a group of them together, marked out the pattern I wanted, and cut them down to the right shapes and sizes. I tried to glue them side by side, but it wasn’t very strong. I ended up having to glue some beams on the bottom to hold them together.

Top side of the wooden floor

Underside of the wooden floor, note the support beams

I gathered up all the extra clippings from the matchsticks and popsicle sticks to save for later. They should make some good rubble or something.

Waste not!

I stopped there for the night. I didn’t attach the floor to the building yet, but here’s what it looks like sitting on top.

It's starting to look like a building!

Building!

Next up will be creating the second floor walls, adding the frame to fill in the gaps, attaching it all, and then getting it painted. Does anyone have any suggestions for painting or texturing the walls? We still have the textured spray that I could use and then paint over, to give it a more rugged, textured look instead of being so smooth.

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Cobblestone!

After the failed attempt at cobblestone on the well piece, we decided we needed a new idea. We needed something that would look like cobblestone and not just gravel.  We also decided that buying tons of Talus was not cost effective (and finding enough rocks of the right sizes and shapes was not very efficient). I found an idea posted by DarkWingDuck on Tom’s Boring Mordheim Forums for making a cobblestone stamp. This was exactly what we were looking for… it’s simple, it’s consistent, and it’s cheap. Our requirements were slightly different so we decided to come up with our own method. Rather than creating a uniform, patterned cobblestone we wanted something rough and random for our city. We decided on using actual stones to create the pattern to give it a more natural look.

The materials we used:

Super Sculpey (Also available at local crafts stores) – We bought 1 box and had plenty left over.
Clay Sculpting tools – Anything that can flatten and cut the edges for creating a square should work.
Handful of small pebbles – We found a rock we liked and smashed it into smaller pieces.
Wax paper – Foil should work just as well, just need something to place the sculpey on while working with it and for cooking it.
Acrylic Paints – Probably a black and white to be mixed for making shades of grey.

We started by taking some sculpey and making it flat on the wax paper, leaving maybe 1/2″ thickness. Then we used the sculpting tools to cut it into a rectangular shape.

Rectangular Sculpey, ready for a pattern

The next step was to take the small rocks/pebbles and gently push them into the sculpey, one at a time. We left the rocks in until the stamp was full of them.

Our pile of small rocks

Once we filled the stamp up with rocks we gently removed them all and then cooked the stamp in the oven following the instructions on the sculpey box (130C or 275F for 15 minutes).

First Stamp

Second Stamp

Once the stamps are finished cooking (and cooled off) it’s time to test them with some foam. We pressed them directly onto our blocks. One of the things that we learned pretty quickly was that it took a LOT of pressure to make a decent indentation in the foam. We are still trying to figure out a good way to make a larger indentation in the foam.

Foam piece decorated up using the cobblestone stamps

Success! … sort of. We know that the process works, but we noticed that the gaps between the stones themselves looked too large. This should be easily corrected by simply placing the rocks closer together when making the stamp. The next step was to figure out how to paint it all. I quickly tossed some brown paint on to make sure the cobblestone would still stand out some after being painted.

Testing out some painting techniques.

As you can see from the test piece, we might need to make a deeper indentation to make it look better after painting. We still have to decide on colors as well. Some ideas I’ve had are brown base with grey rocks, light grey base with dark grey rocks, or dark grey base with light grey rocks. We’ll have to test them all out to see which looks best, but that’s for another day.

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