A ton of progress from Oakbound as the year grows old.... and a chance of free minis!

Well well well.... I recently posted a winter newsletter from Oakbound on the blog, but now I have EVEN MORE updates to show you!

First off, they've been a long time coming but the master castings of The Woods miniatures are finally here:



 

Now, inevitably there are always little issues to sort out with first batches. In this case there are a few missing claws and teeth and some truncated horns. Nothing too serious. Unfortunately there was a more serious error though in one mould, which has led to two figures being in need of rescuing and recasting.

 

Sadly that means there will be a delay and more cost involved in sending them, but at least they look salvageable- the essential details are preserved.

 

Good news along with the bad. The batch also included fresh castings of the Myeri Marsh Demons which are for sale again through the Oakbound Shop. But even more excitingly it included....

 

 

Chico's Evil Space Dorfs! Yes, there are a mystery two figures there as well which will be unveiled.... sometime soon. I'll let the man himself do that when they get to his post box! These guys should be for sale soon, along with other Dorfs most probably, but no hard and fast details yet. There's also my crew for the Oldhammer at sea battle at BOYL 2015- The Airship Goblinks!

 

 

I'm nabbing enough castings to adequately crew my zeppelin, but in case you did want to get hold of some there'll be a strictly limited release of about 20 of these sets available...

 

TO GET YOURSELF A SET OF GOBLINKS!

 

You'll need to either be one of the first five people to order from the Oakbound shop after Christmas day OR snap up one of the ten sets that are listed in the shop from January OR...

 

link to Fimm McCool's blog from yours. I'm trying to break the 30,000 views mark by Christmas and need 100 more views to do it. If the target gets met and your link shows up in the traffic sources as the highest-ranking referring URL I'll send you a set of Goblinks absolutely free. Isn't Fimm a nice chap? :)

 

One last addition, there was another figure in with this most recent batch, for an excellent chap called Christopher who runs Mad Imp Studios who seem to be on the brink of producing some very lovely dungeon scenery which I must get to go with my Twisting Catacombs items. He hasn't given me permission to show it, but if he does I will. In the meantime go check out their facebook page and given them some support to get this brilliant project up and running!

A ton of progress from Oakbound as the year grows old.... and a chance of free minis!

Myeri Marsh Demons- back in stock at Oakbound.co.uk

Latest batch of Marsh Demon and Fenfolk castings have arrived from the foundry- orders now being taken at Oakbound.co.uk and should still be time for them to arrive by Christmas. The rest of the Woods range should be on the site for purchasing with all your lovely Christmas money in late December!

Myeri Marsh Demons- back in stock at Oakbound.co.uk

Lost in the Oakbound Woods part 4- Preparing for Dragonmeet

It's Dragonmeet at Earl's Court this weekend....

Thought I'd better sort out some nice display for Oakbound Miniatures, enter my almost-nearly-finished terrain!

Of course, this is only some of it... it's a small table after all and Tripods! needs some room too! Today's main task has been sorting the water and foliage. As you can see, the tall one now doubles as a point of sale display for blister packs.

Tree branches take two forms. For the barer trees lower down the slopes I pulled sections of hobby lichen and glued them onto the branches trying to get the stalks aligned for a natural look. Higher up the slopes I used branches pulled from one of those toilet-brush-style model railway trees. These are nylon bristles with flock glued on and give a nice foliage scatter and branch cluster pattern. Don't cut them though as you end up with bits of bare nylon sticking out, pulling them out gives them a more natural look. I used superglue with an accelerator spray to get them to stay in place quickly, fiddly but well worth it.

The water on these sections is clear vinyl glued over the pre-painted and textured riverbed. The ripples were made by painting on fast-drying PVA wood glue and the shine on the banks where the stream is trickling down is made by using super-thin superglue dribbled down them, about 4 layers to build up the shine. The superglue mingles with the wet PVA resulting in the foamy look here, which can be stippled around with a stick or old brush to give a flowing effect.

 



 Hopefully they'll show off the minis well enough to get me some sales! If you're in the London area the show is dead cheap to get into and the gaming lineup looks brilliant, stop by and say hi!

Lost in the Oakbound Woods part 4- Preparing for Dragonmeet

Lost in the Oakbound woods... making display scenery part 1

Back in January I needed some nice scenery to photograph the Marsh Demons against. Of course I had used my back garden for my army shots:

 

And borrowed Bristol Vanguard's marsh board for these shots of Oakbound's Marsh Demons:

 

 



But with the (then) forthcoming Kickstarter in mind I wanted something which better represented the world of The Woods that these characters inhabit. At the same time my lovely partner and I were spending quite a lot of time walking through the beautiful misty mornings of Vassal's park, Bristol:

 

With its steep, wooded slopes, winding stone steps and river this was exactly the English countryside feel I wanted for the range. It reminded me of holidays to Dartmoor when I was younger, scenery which almost certainly influenced my love of the work of Brian Froud who bases much of his work on the rugged and bleak beauty of that area. I snapped a lot of photos and began to plan out how the scenery would work.

I wanted something that would provide a background, so having height was important. I also wanted scenery that could be put together in different ways and photographed from different angles to give an idea of how vast the wood is. Of course, I also wanted to b able to use the scenery for games, but more as a border for a board, or perhaps as two sides of a valley running along board edges from which an ambush is sprung. With this in mind I designed and built four levels of modules- two tall modules, a choice of four medium modules that would sit in front, four low modules that would complete the slope and a selection of square flat modules that could have river sections built onto them. The medium and low modules would be deep to allow for miniatures to be placed on paths winding through them, the tall modules would be largely to provide backdrops.

The frames with their Styrofoam cladding were finished in February. I was hoping to have the scenery ready for the UK Games Expo in June. The modules were cut so that the silhouette of each end would butt evenly up against the next. I also designed a large corner module so I could make L-Shaped setups. Then I got busy with the Tripods! release, designing and releasing The Woods, painting up the Marsh Demon masters, sculpting for the kickstarter.... then June came.

 

As you can see, a rather hastily constructed piece of terrain! As it happens there wasn't space for much else so this worked fine, but I was determined to have better ready for the full range should the Kickstarter complete.

 

After sitting in a box under my workbench since February (the terrain, not me!) the scenery finally came out again last week. I used a hotwire to carve the slopes, steps and features I wanted into the Styrofoam.

 



The great thing about the hotwire (apart from the cyanide output and lack of poly dust) is that the cut edges already have that rocky texture. Nevertheless, today's task was to glue pieces of real rock on for those nice overhanging boulders, use a ballpoint to draw on the bits of stone wall that would pop up from time to time, stick in bits of real twig for trees and texture with polyfiller. The result:

 



The trees at Vassal's are beech trees- straight and slim with fine bark so I haven't gone all sStillmania on them (though I will do some more gnarly ones later). All the same, I have built in roots with Milliput and will be using paper clips stuck into the trunks to build branches onto. Much of the foliage is high above the levels of the banks, so I probably won't give them full canopies, just a smattering of leaves. The next step was to give everything a base coat of dark, earthy/rocky colour. I chose to mix black and brown on the surface to give a blending of different shades. Much of the scenery will be covered in 'earth' and 'leaf litter' in any case so it was only really important to get the rocks about the right colour:

 

 



 The gloss on the picture is just because it wasn't dry, although I probably will use a gloss varnish in places to indicate damp, mossy surfaces. There'll also be some water on some of the modules. So here are some shots of the setup as it currently looks. Hopefully next week I'll get onto the first layers of drybrushing, adding the earth, leaf litter, lichen etc. and making tree branches.

Also hopefully by the time I'm done some master casts will have arrived to photograph in front of it!

Lost in the Oakbound woods... making display scenery part 1

New website goes live!

The Propworkshop, my 'real work' enterprise, has got a new website to celebrate its relaunch. After several years of not taking on prop commissions I went freelance again in the autumn and wanted a revamp of the business.

Followers of this blog might be more interested in this section of the site:
Oakbound Games

And more specifically:
Oakbound Miniatures

which will be the host site for my range of old-school roleplaying minis. There's just the Myeri on there at the moment, but 6 (yes 6!) more ranges are due to be released by Kickstarter around easter so keep checking back. The paypal system has a couple of bugs, so if you decide to make some purchases please email me as well otherwise they might take your money and not let me know what you want! Hopefully these bugs will be eradicated very soon!

There's also a nice forum section for playtesting and developing games, but most excitingly it has a section for you to post photos of your lovely painted minis. Oakbound minis are designed to be versatile and customisable and we'd love to see what you do with yours! I'm hoping Mr Saturday, Lenihan and Chico will get us off to a flying start as I know they've already done stirling things with their marsh demons!

New website goes live!

Post 100- The Myeri arrive!

And most of them have left to go to their new swampy homes; in the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Poland, Japan, Australia and America! Some are still here though, so if you'd like the leftovers get in quickly!

 

Here's a bag of lovely lead... what nice things lurk inside?

 

 

These! Quite a contingent of gribbly monsters, shown here without their numerous heads, arms, tails, pet birds etc. Don't want any little bits getting lost!

 

And my greens came back! Now looking decidedly baked there's a surprising amount which can be salvaged, looks like I'll have some in my own army after all.

Post 100- The Myeri arrive!

Fresh from the woods- MYERI MARSH DEMONS

Here they are then, a couple of oldschool-looking pictures of the Marsh Demons cast in lovely lead. Please excuse the blu-tac in the assembled shots- don't want to glue the masters together!

 

 

Myeri castings catalogue page

 

 

Draoi

 

Tiarna

 

Woldlouse

 

 

Fresh from the woods- MYERI MARSH DEMONS

Tormenting Demons...

The Marsh Demons have arrived from the foundry... the guys have done an ace job, but no pics just yet. Instead, here's a C-series-style catalogue page I knocked up in some free time this afternoon, just as a teaser!

Tormenting Demons...

The Myeri are coming....

The news reached me yesterday that my moulds are ready. The master casts of Clan Myeri sculpts are done and the figures are ready for production. There are 10 of these in all, 8 Marsh Demons, a Woldlouse and a mystery figure which will be revealed in good time. Eventually these will go on general sale along with a board and roleplay game which is being tested at the moment. The rules will be freely available in the new year for playtesting and a forum will be set up to discuss ideas, development and gameplay. In the meantime, though, the Myeri Marsh Demons are available solely to Oldhammer Forum users so if you want some you'll have to hop over and sign up!

Pictures of the greens in progress can be found here and prices can be found here.

The Myeri are coming....