Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Monday 15 February 2016

ECW - Boldon Hill - The Set-Up


Painting and varnishing of buildings is now ended, and the dining room is now set up for the Battle of Boldon Hill (24 Mar 1644), which is scheduled for Wednesday evening. Because I can't count, I dug out one extra regiment of foot for the Royalists and - since it seems a pity to put them away again - I've added them to the OOB.

The view in the photo is facing almost due south - the Earl of Leven's Covenanters are on the left, the Marquis of Newcastle's Royalists on the right; the villages (which still exist today) are, left to right, Cleadon, East Boldon (with adjacent farming enclosures) and West Boldon (complete with St Nicholas' Church). To put a geographical fix on this, the Covenanters have the North Sea behind them, the ground beyond the right-hand edge of the table drops away past Hylton Castle to the River Wear, and the town of Sunderland is some miles beyond the opposite far corner of the table. There may, of course, be some minor tweaking of initial unit placings before we start.

The nice shiny stream (the Don Burn) is finished with brush-on decoupage medium, which I haven't tried before, but which does the job with no hassle.

4 comments:

  1. Handsome layout! Once pulled from storage, I would keep the extra Royalist regiment of foote out too; especially if I was playing Royalist!

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  2. Very nice looking. Butttttt, could you please elaborate of the decoupage? At first it sounded like you brushed tge mefium onto the table surface but then I thought perhaps it was applied to river/stream sections which are just laid on top?

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    1. I got the excellent Tony Barr at East Riding Miniatures to laser cut me a load of 7" hexes in 3mm MDF - exact size of my main table cells. I made a stack of road sections - flat - just painted - and have been using those since I was humiliated by the photos of some tatty old laminated paper road pieces at the Battle of Nantwich -

      http://prometheusinaspic.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-battle-of-nantwich-history-is-still.html

      I've been intending to use some of the remaining stock to paint up some river sections, but have been scared of having a disaster. For Wednesday's fight I need a stream, so painted a stream on about a dozen of the hex tiles. They are simply painted in the main pea-soup baseboard green, then the stream was painted in using various shades of brown and khaki, and I applied a single coat of decoupage medium to the "water" - dries to a good shine in about 15 minutes, with a bit of a ripple in the brush strokes (brush carefully downstream!). I have written numbers on the back of the tiles for the stream, since this stream is designed as a fixed set, but I'll have a look at doing a more serious river, using sections which can fit together more generally.

      This will be project 267c. I shall get back to painting Spaniards first.

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  3. Fantastic layout there Tony, I have long admired your C&C board :)

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