Countdown...

Less than a week to go (three days, in fact) until the Wargamer show on Sunday 11th. We've made good progress over the past couple of weeks, and got another session on Sunday just gone. The boards are finished. The trees, woods and hedges are finished. The redoubts (two of them) are finished. We've got handouts (details of the game, and details of the group) printed and ready. The figures are almost finished (just some Imperialist pikemen to finish painting as of Sunday).

That leaves Gary with the camp pieces, and me with the backscene to do.

We planned on having a 2' section along the short edge of the river board (where the river leaves the board) and a 4' section along the long edge where the town of Steinkirche (the namesake of our battle) would be. After a bit of discussion, we decided to cut this down to two 2' sections instead (meaning I only have to paint 4' of backscene rather than 6').

While I was at Gary's on Sunday we began sketching out the scenes themselves onto the sections of mounting board. We decided on using watercolours and I've been making progress with the painting over the past couple of days.

Still a work-in-progress, but not too bad so far I think. I don't claim to be an expert watercolour painter, or a landscape painter at all so I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out (although in some ways, it looks almost childlike, with the bright blue sky and the bright green grass...). Perhaps not as realistic as I'd like, but like I said, I'm not an expert and they're not designed as pieces of artwork or to stand up to close scrutiny. In truth, if we're not happy with them on the day, they can easily be removed - they're not crucial to the game in any way.


In other news, as well as working on the backscene, I've put a few hours over the last couple of evenings into getting some Napoleonic figures based and finished.

Reviewing some of the photos I posted up in the last post, some of my figures look woefully poor compared to Gary's. All those white edges stick out like a sore thumb, and look terrible. Those are all the original batch of Napoleonic figures I painted many years ago, and the choice of basing material was poor to say the least. It's not stood up well at all to the rigours of handling, being a less than sturdy thin cardboard (think cereal box thin). Once I've finished the current batch (only eight bases of Dragoons and eight bases of Voltigeurs to go) I think I'll have to go back and tidy the older bases up, or maybe even rebase them completely. We'll see...