Wooden miscellaneous

 

I’ve finished a few bits and bobs, thematically connected by all being made of wood.

A while back, I alluded to a mystery structure that I wanted to build for the first Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario, which is this outhouse, as when I was racking my brain thinking what would be an interesting building that it would be funny for a zombie to stumble out of this is what came to mind!

I knocked up a quick base structure out of cereal box card, using a miniature to eyeball the size:

In hindsight I think I made it a little too large, as tends to be the case when I eyeball it, but it’s not so big an issue that I’m not giving to use it!

To help my structure remain vaguely square, a small square of balsa wood halved diagonally makes a super pair of internal supports to keep those right angles... well, right!

Then, like the wooden shack I previously made, it was clad with distressed coffee stirrers and split tongue depressors (top tip - prep a load while you’re watching a movie rather than doing them individually as and when you need them so that when it comes to cladding you can just crack on rather than having to stop and start)

Here it is with the walls done and a door added:

I did consider putting on some tiny hinges and a handle for added realism, but after some quick experimentation abandoned the idea as not being worth it!

More planks were added to add a roof with a little overhang, and voila, a queue is forming already:

Then it was undercoated black and drybrushed with a series of browns and tans until it was ready to grace a tiny battlefield, modelled here with some miniatures painted by my daughter:

She then went on to invent a board game:

 

The two large crates were made in much the same way; they started life as a pair of Nerds packets that came in a secret Santa gift at the last work Christmas party I went to (so, 2019?) 

Then they were clad using the usual method using distressed coffee stirrers

Rather than trying to measure the planks, I just stuck on the whole stick and trimmed off the overhang with my clippers, which made for much quicker and easier construction.

The sides were built overlapping the ends, to avoid any awkward looking gaps. I was originally going to apply some of the same planks diagonally across the outsides, but figured that they would stand out too much and look a bit odd, when I remembered that many moons back someone on the Lead Adventure Forum had sent me some card sheets that had been embossed to look riveted (so many moons ago, according to the postmark on the envelope they came in they had been posted exactly 11 years to the day before I pulled them out for this project) which when cut into strips was applied to look like metal banding:

Trade secret - one of the four strips doesn’t quite meet on the underside, but I can hide that with careful placement on the table!

And lo, some boxes that are large enough that when stacked on top of each other or placed on their side block line of sight rather than just being set dressing:

And last but not least, the single crate. It’s a plastic piece from a Heroclix scenery set that I found whilst digging through my Heroclix stuff for... something that will hopefully appear repainted on the blog in the near future (and for a heavy handed clue, this search happened about three minutes after I finished watching the first episode of Wandavision).

Honestly, it probably would have been fine to use as-is, but I repainted it anyway (part of me thinks I do this because my painting doesn’t look ‘realistic’, so it would look weird having my scenery and whatnot also looking like that rather than painted). 

Quick bit of dry brushing, and I’ve produced the best thing I’ve painted all year:

So, what’s left on my RoSD scenario 1 checklist?

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens 

Trees, woodpile, crates and barrels and treasure tokens are all in various stages of completion (everything is at least undercoated), and I’ve got all the bits for my planned playing surface (although it remains to be seen whether the idea actually works...)

Speaking of checklists, this post lets me amend a couple of things on the Challenge:

Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (2/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (and when I do that, start a project to have painted miniatures to represent all of the Races in the Players Handbook)
• Add at least 3 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

In other news, the Tally has changed, due to me gifting a vulture mini to the pal that turned me on to Rangers in the first place (don’t worry, it was safely posted through a letterbox in order to maintain social distancing) which leaves the current total at:

2 vs 18 = -16

There are at least a dozen miniatures on the painting tile currently at that annoying stage where you think they’re just one little push away from finishing, but somehow are still there the night after, but hopefully I can knock a few out and drag that number back into the positive!