I’ve made a few minor changes to the site that should help out with navigation a little bit. At the bottom of every post (or just about every post) is a list of related posts that will help you track a specific topic/project. All of the cobblestone posts are linked together, for example. Hopefully this will make navigating and tracking all the different projects easier, especially as we get more of them. Any feedback is welcome!
Final structure with broken walls
FINALLY!!! Now that we have a finalized idea for our Flagstone, we can start building buildings and other terrain features to fill the blocks for the table.
So far the first building has turned out well, although I built it completely backwards. For starters I glued the entire house together before cutting out the windows, or “breaking” the walls, which just made it more time consuming then if I had cut them out when the walls were still flat.
Currently the house is very clean looking and still missing many details, I plan to add more trimwork around the walls, and I have already started making the the floor look like wood planks, as well as trimming the corner pieces slightly so they dont look so perfect (which will be seen in the next post).
I took some new pictures of the flagstone in the natural light today. These pics show off the colors much better, and as a bonus they’re not blurry! I got a couple pictures outside in the shade and a picture in direct sunlight for comparison. You can really see the texture and the variety of colors in these images. Enjoy!
Flagstone
Yeah, I decided to use the actual name for this instead of calling it cobblestone again, mostly because it actually looks like Flagstone now instead of funny shaped cobblestone. I did some work last night with texturing and painting the stones and it looks even better than before. We finally have something the looks random and rough, and not so uniform.
While working on a house last week with Tewfik we put together a small block to use as the base for the house (this post is coming soon!). After painting the flagstone it just looked too bland and uniform (and not so much like rocks) when put together with the house and miniatures. I got yet another idea from my girlfriend for painting though. This new method is quite a bit of work (it took me several hours for a 6″ block), but I think it looks excellent. I’m sure with some practice I can get the painting time down to something more reasonable.
Spackled
I have been able to do a little bit of work on the foamcore
In addition to the Spackle I also tested out a method for doing a chipped away look with the underlying framework showing. This consisted of cutting away the top layer of paper on the foamcore, then drawing in a brick pattern on the foam with a pen. When combined with the Spackle it really gives the look of a broken wall with the brick framework showing. You can also see on the left side of the window where I added in a small crack in the wall. This is pretty easy to do with the Spackle and a sharp knife. Read more »
I’ve begun to add new downloads to the Mordheim downloads section now. I have a TON of stuff downloaded that I’m attempting to get permission to post. I have already received permission to host downloads from The Mordheimer’s Information Centre so I’ve put some of that up already. I have almost all of the official and unofficial Games Workshop warbands available, as well as a few other non-GW warbands. I have some additional scenarios, optional rules, and a few other things that I’d like to get up as well.
Bear with me while I work on the downloads page, I know that the layout isn’t the most appealing right now. I’ll be moving things around and adding stuff until I’ve got everything up. As always, if you have anything of interest that you think we should host then let us know or email it to us. Thanks!
Since I struggled to get a good picture of the final cobblestone with the lighting I had before, I rushed home today to take pictures while it was still light outside. Here are a few more pics of the final cobblestone in natural light and without a flash. They look a lot better this way, and a lot darker, but for some reason it looks more blue than it really is. Anyway, check out these new pics. Read more »
I’ve started optimizing the images on the site to require less bandwith and load faster. It turns out I’m a bit of a newb when it comes to WordPress, so I was doing the images in a horribly inefficient manner. I’ve already started fixing up old posts and all new posts will use a lot less bandwith and should load much faster. Enjoy!
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.
Testing block
Over the last week I’ve been working to try and get our cobblestone (well, technically I think it’s flagstone) method just right. I’ve tested out a ton of different methods, so I thought I’d post up everything I’ve done up to this point so you can see all the iterations. I’ve tried drybrushing, washing, tracing with markers, priming/not priming, adding texture, and more. I think I finally got something pretty close to what we want, though there are still a few things to try out. I was quite surprised at how well something as simple as a gray marker has worked. I’ve been using it to add depth not only through coloring the grout, but to force a deeper imprint and fix up some areas that didn’t stamp so well. Read more »
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