"08 Under Glass" Topic

I happened to be in a hardware store today and saw some cheap paint brushes and sandpaper. I decided to try out a quick experiment that I've been wanted to do for sometime.

The idea is that I would take sandpaper and dry brush it different colors to make a map I could put under plexiglass so that I could get my O8 figs up off the clutter of the terrain a bit. I also think that its a cool look when a hex board it beneath plexiglas.

First I painted one sheet burnt umber, then used a hair dryer to speed the process. I tried to dry brush it green but I didn't like the look. However I've been experimenting with a new flock mixture that I think looks awesome and I wanted to try it out a bit more. Then I added trees to the mix and here were the results:

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On the last one I sprinkled dark green flock to show where elevations are. A much better way would be to use it to show ridge lines and such and blind spots in the ground. I could also outline hills with twine or something and have that all down beneath the plexiglass. You could also place small chits, like numbers saying how tall a hill is, whats a marsh or what density woodland is. You could also use them to show the fields of view for artillery firing from a hill- maybe two firing lane markers printed on acetate sheets and then placed on every hill along with the ranges. It might take some work but it would be really cool and detailed if anyone wanted to go to that much trouble.

The other cool thing about the plexiglass is that if you wanted to do really huge games using this method of terrain you could get larger sheets of plexiglass, match them up and then use dealer sticks to move the formations across tables larger than you would otherwise be able to- eight to ten feet maybe. You would just scoot the figs across the plexiglass.

There's a few other interesting effects you can get with the fine grit sandpaper that's on the thinner paper. It contracts as the flock is drying so that it develops some surprisingly realistic undulations.

Very nice idea. It would work very well for aviation games too.

Many years back we did similar things in my old club for board games. We made large-scale (4X8) versions of "Rail Baron" "Axis & Allies" and "Diplomacy" hand-painted onto plywood, then used a 4X8 sheet of plexiglass over top of it. Kept it clean and prevented damage from spills, etc.

I like what you're doing with these 08 armies. Keep up the good work!

Why isn't the plexiglass crushing the trees?

The Much Esteemed Editor,

The trees are just little loose balls of clump foliage. They're spongey enough to where they can support the weight of the plexiglass without being smushed all the way down. And because they're spongey they don't look flattened out by the plexiglass. It's a very cool trick. You might even have the stuff lying around to try it out.

If you zoom in all the way to the original size on this one you can sort of see it. These are far from finished, but they'd been a good start for a neat looking display game or a highly portable and variable system- the woods aren't glued down and so they can be kept in a bag and rearranged as needed. You could do all sorts of modular variations. You could put something like this under plexiglass

…but not have to worry about the game surface being cluttered up by loose foliage.

Interesting concept. Seems to work well with 6mm.

It works best in the hot-head shots, where the shadows under the bases are less visible – they do tend to create the effect that the units are floating in the air above the battlefield, which in effect they are!

I'll stick with indoor/outdoor carpeting, but it really looks great and I can see how it would work for any type of game. Thanks for sharing.

Arthur 1815-

They do sort of look that way in the pics but the effect is very different when you see it in person. I still haven't figured out the best way to photograph 3mm figs…

Really nice looking battlefields. thanks for the ongoing sharing of your 3mm projects, quite inspiring.

FMS

Kindly stop showing these 3mm pics. Its getting me interested in doing a sideline in 3mm! :O)

Thanks for all the compliments guys!

I went to the hobby store for some materials for a secret project I am now working on. They had some rolls of the cheap pre-flocked model rail road paper in a nice raw umber/dead grass color. 25" x 35". not sure why they picked that size but own-well. Its about the exact size as my larger piece of plexiglass. I'm going to try to use it with my plexiglass technique to make the sort of super detailed terrain set-up I posted about above. When I get done I will as usual post some pics (sorry Trajanus!) If I can get it down the way I have it in my head it should be pretty impressive…

What a clever idea – these look really good and must open up all sorts of possibilities.

When I get done I will as usual post some pics (sorry Trajanus!)

Too late for that! Just ordered a couple of bags plus command to see if I can paint that small any more! ;o)

BTW: How do you do the flags?

Hi Trajanus!

Glad to her you've jumped on the party wagon!
I made the flags by taking the freebies from Warflag.com and then shrinking them in Power Point. Then I printed them off at Office Depot/Staples (not sure which it was). Then I cut them out with an xacto knife, folded them, unfolded them, added a dot of glue in the middle and then used tweezers to position the flag around the bayonet of an infantry figure in a plain infantry strip. I don't really use the command strips as I can't paint flags to save my life and they always complicate my efforts to have the flag always be centered.

I made the flags by taking the freebies from Warflag.com and then shrinking them in Power Point.

Ah right! I've done that before myself.

Sad to say, being a bit anal on these matters, my flags will be on the command strips and will be in the centre! :o)

Actually, these ACW items may be the lead for Napoleonics later if they get around to doing British. At the moment they don't do the right shape hats and like Wellington said, from as distance its all about shape not colour.

But I want to see what figures paint up like first.

My idea is that you just do the colours that can be seen at 600 yards away with the naked eye. On the basis that if you can see it all if a man is one yard from you, then in 1/600th scale, what is visible 600 yards away – not a lot!

So in the earlier period no facing colours or piping on uniforms to worry about and Hussars just have a jacket of one colour and trousers of another etc.

I think ACW will be all about light and dark. Light shades for Confederates with dark blanket rolls and the reverse for the Union, that kind of thing.

This guy seems to have the idea:

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How do you do yours?

Trajanus-

The big thing is to use bright colors. Brighter than you would use for 6mm even. And, as Macunaima (I think it was him) mentioned, you should try to contrast the figs with their bases unless you are going the invisible base route and plan to have their bases blend into the game board/mat. My initial Confederates for instance are a bit dark because I used a medium gray when I did them. I should have used a light gray. With the Union you want to use a normal strong medium blue for the jackets and a much lighter blue for the pants.

Obviously you have to line the strips up on sticks. Pack them close together, side by side if possible. You can then paint the pants with one unbroken brush stroke and it will leave a break between the legs so that they're clearly defined. Then you pick take the main color, blue or gray and run a brush between each figure. You can be very sloppy at this point and when the figs are finished no one will be able to tell. After that pick out the arms on the front of the figs with a short brush stroke, going down the entire stick at once. Then pick out the hands and faces and the blanket rolls (I liked your idea with the blanket rolls). Finally do the rifle stock with some brown and then run silver along the bayonets in one unbroken brush stroke on both sides. As a last step paint the strip green or brown.

My Confederates are all individually painted so they're really rag-tag. What I do is take two or three earth tones, a primary color or two (for the blanket roll- red is the best) and gray and then go along the line with one color, painting pants and jackets at random and leaving others unpainted. Then I pick the next color and do that one. When I'm done everything is painted up.

With Napoleonics I highly recommend a gray base coat. I think it would work better on Confedeates as well, maybe with a wash. If you have a dark gray base coat and then paint light grey over that you'll end up with two-tone shading,which at 3mm is pretty impressive when see up close. Black was fine with the Union figs though.

Well the new recruits reported to boot camp this morning.

All I can say is OMG! ! and several more besides!

I stood some up against my 28mm Union and laughed for 20 minutes!

What are they made from? They are as hard as nails – must have a lot of tin in the mix! All good in my view and it makes for very crisp casting. I'll see what they are like when I base coat but at the moment I don't think I'll get dragged down into detail, I need my glasses on to just find'em! :o)

One surprise is the moulded flags, they didn't register with me when I was on the website but now, as the figures are so hard, I think I will go the Warflag/PowerPoint route but glue direct to the stiff metal flags, there's enough gap to facilitate this between castings.

Truly impressive!

I have found one small downside to these figures. They are very tough but they don't bend!

I pushed my thumb nail between the flag bearers to check out the gap in line with my Warflag/PowerPoint intentions and PING! the outermost figure snapped off.

"That's odd" I thought so tried it again and PING!

Out with the SuperGlue, at least it won't show!

Hi Trajanus- Sorry or I would have let you know about the trick with these guys sooner. I spent the weekend hiking up and down some mountains in Northern California. BTW, it occured to me that if anyone ever wanted to do a fun take on the Penninsula or needs an interesting campaign map you could do much worse than to take a map of California's central valley and run it in there. Driving up and down the five I kept thinking that the foothills on the valleys western edge would have made an excellent, maybe even impregnable defensive position in the period.

At any rate, if you want to cut O8 strips apart you can't use your fingers. The metal is waaay too hard. But, if you get some small wire snips its really, really easy. Just set the tip of the snips at the tiny little line that Marcin has sculpted inbetween all the figs. Just exert a little bit of pressue there with your hand cupped around the strip and the figs will not only pop off, they'll fly off the strip without any damage at all. Those standard bearers are actually his most fragile figurs, which is why I just do the bayonet thing myself. But yeah, you definitely want to use some wire snips on them.

For the record though, last week I had to deflash and snip up over 1000 of his new Napoleonic curassiers for a mega project I'm doing. I de-flashed over 1000 figs (300+ strips). I only broke *one* figure off its base. 1 out of 1000 is pretty good for figures that are only 3mm tall. That weird metal mixture Marcin came up with is perfect for these figs.. probably wouldn't be pretyt bad for bigger ones though. Also for the record, I've never had a broken bayonet either! They're a lot tougher than they look.

They're a lot tougher than they look.

That's for sure, which is why the PING! thing took me by surprise! :o)

This looks great.

I believe your series of posts on O8 figs may be inspiring me into action.

Eldorado-
Glad to hear it! I'm going to be doing another post hopefully this week or this weekend about a giant, semi-secret project I'm working on.

BTW- I'm really interested in the computer program you're working on and I had an idea for something similar but much more simple that I think a lot of people would be interested in. I'll get back to you on it in a PM or on your other thread.