The Hills Are Alive, and Hollow

During this next week or so I should receive some more of the new MDF pieces for my battlefields. I was about to use the word "scenery", but they are not very scenic - they are more game equipment. In the strange world of hexagonal geology, scenery is a contextual term.

You can never have enough hills. New hills almost ready - one of the old ones
nearest the camera

I made up the 10 new hills which Michael at Supreme Littleness has cut for me to date. These are 7-inch hexes, to match my existing stock, but laser cut from 6mm MDF in two parts per hill tile - to save weight (and in the hope that someone else might want 6-inch hexes in 6mm MDF?), the underhill (?) is a hexagonal doughnut, as you see.

Weight-saving hill, worm's-eye view

The tops and bottoms were glued together (very accurately - my tongue was probably sticking out) using "tacky" PVA glue, a very useful product which was new to me. Once dried, I painted them up with the house standard Crested Moss #2 baseboard colour. I also did some gentle dabbing on (spackling?) of a diluted darker green, to match my older hills and to make them more obviously different from the unspackled plain beneath. I was far too tentative with the spackling - it dried a lot paler than I expected, so I'll improve that when I paint up the next shipment of 10 hills.

Old hill on the right - yes, I know, I have to make a better fist of texturing
the new ones - I'll get to it. I'm very pleased with the match, and the old ones
are only very slightly thicker, which doesn't matter.

My original hills are ½-inch Insulation Board, cut by hand with a steel rule and a Stanley knife in 1974 or so - I couldn't do that now - I wouldn't even contemplate such a miserable job. How I still have all my fingers and thumbs is a mystery. No, lasers are the answer, my friends. Quantum science and those billions of dollars invested to develop the laser were all to avoid Old Foy risking his fingers with a craft knife. Obvious snag, of course, is that you can't laser-cut MDF thicker than 6mm - I think it just catches fire or something. So Michael has given me two-layer hills in 2 x 6mm, which is a close enough match for half an inch.

Very nice - only practical observations thus far are that the burned edges require 3 coats of the baseboard colour to hide the charcoal, and the MDF is a lot smoother than insulation board, so I need to be a bit more wholehearted with the spackling to give better texturing. It is, as ever, a learning process...

To achieve a more interesting effect with the dabbed texture colour, I invested in a natural sea sponge from Boots the Chemist. Ouch. Great idea, but of all the money I have ever wasted on my hobby, the price of this small sponge was the most eye-watering little surprise. These must be Fair Trade sponges - the guys who harvest them must have yachts at Monte Carlo.

Research on the colour of river water continues. I had a rough idea I might be looking for a colour called Teal, or similar, but it seems such a colour is not in vogue. I have a couple of candidate shades ticked on the extant Dulux sample cards - tricky business, this. For a start, my colour vision is not wonderfully accurate, and the shade cards are just bewildering - far too much information. If someone shows me 100 different varieties of greenish-blue then I can't cope - I am even distracted from what it was I was looking for in the first place. I found a wonderful colour yesterday, but it took about 15 seconds to realise that it might be suitable for the Caribbean in July, but not the Yorkshire Moors or Aberdeenshire in February. Anyway, I have a couple of promising candidates to ponder over. I hope I don't just buy something completely different in a moment of panic.

ECW - More Siege Artillery

Big ones, small ones - from siege cannons to a 2-man peashooter

Having worked on the oh-so-shiny gunners from the Mike & Whiskers Legacy Collection, and dug some appropriate guns out of the lead pile, I suddenly have a big dollop (I believe that is the correct military term) of extra artillery - specifically for sieges.

My ECW armies are already probably over-provided with field artillery, and I have a fine big mortar, but the approach of the siege project has highlighted a shortage of odd guns on small bases, to fit on tops of towers and in "mounts", not to mention actual wall-crushers.

A couple of very serious 'cannons of 8' - if these chaps (provisionally called Stan &
Olly) shoot at your town walls they will stay shot at, and don't forget it. Anyone who
observes that the ramrod would only reach halfway down the barrel is correct, of
course, but may spend the evening on the naughty step. Obviously they have a longer
one stashed somewhere, don't they? 

None of this is of particularly fine quality - the rehashed gunners are purely functional, for a start - but I have ticked another box for the list of things I need to do to prepare for sieges. Tick.

Only ECW artillery job still in my queue is to paint up a few more frame guns for the Scots - I have the gun castings, but am trying to think of how to provide suitable gunner figures in 20mm. Conversions coming up, methinks.

Next job is to slap some paint on some new hills (hexagonal, of course - MDF, of course) and start some tests to get a colour scheme for my forthcoming river system. These aren't siege jobs, but it would surely tidy things up a bit around here if I could store some of this MDF away in the scenery boxes.

Latest thought on a colour for rivers is - rather to my surprise - darkish blue-green. I was going to go for mud brown again, but somehow this doesn't seem right if the new river pieces may also form lakes and coastline. I'll get some sample pots from the hardware store and see how it looks.

Hooptedoodle #213 - Elegance of the 1960s

A friend shared this on his Facebook account, and I thought it was so good that I should borrow it here - splendid stuff.

Despite the manic Britishness of the whole thing, I find this clip strangely uplifting. This must have been one of the more powerful Lambrettas, I guess - 175cc? Still a daunting load for such a small unit, though - I guess it would get a little out of breath going over the old Hardknott Pass.

We've been making rather slow progress with organising a summer holiday. Appropriately inspired by the earnest pluck of this lot, I am determined to try a little harder.

And the caravan, you will note, can be erected by morons...

Hooptedoodle #212 – Technology Yawn Hour – Mac Viruses

Good Heavens - THEY are going to terminate my account - I must do something really
stupid without delay. This screen courtesy of EasyShopper, I believe - interestingly, the target
URL for this screen is something to do with a mortgage portal. Why don't these creeps just
go and die somewhere? 

For a few years now I have been using a Macintosh as my main computer. I still have a desktop Windows machine, because it is much better for some jobs, but the Mac is my main internet tool. One great advantage this brings is that I have almost forgotten about viruses – the Apple architectures are less vulnerable to malware anyway, but also the relatively small potential-victim base makes the OS X world less attractive to those sad little single-cell organisms who spend their nights attempting to wreck the internet by contructing viruses.

I’ve had a few minor jolts this week. First came from an invitation to update my installed (Mac) version of Adobe Acrobat. I accepted this, as one does, and very quickly got an alert that an unauthorised browser extension was being installed – Joyround. I attempted to cancel the installation, but my Safari browser went very strange immediately afterwards. My homepage was changed to an unfamiliar Google search request screen, and all new opening tabs showed the same screen. Google Calendar, which I use on my desktop and my iPhone for all family and business schedules, also began to behave strangely, interrupting the normal functionality with a recurring pop-up screen (which I couldn’t exit) inviting me to apply for a fancy deal on an iPhone6.

I corrected my browser preferences, and I ran a Mac malware checker, and found and eliminated the aforementioned Joyround abomination. Sorted – I am back to the normal Mac world of calm, except that I seem to be getting intermittent advert interruptions from something called EasyShopper – I’ll see if I can find how to get rid of this. The stupid screen shown at the top of this post is courtesy of EasyShopper, as far as I can tell.

Discussion with my son reveals that he recently had to reinstall Adobe Acrobat on his Windows laptop, because an update seemed to have put an undesirable extension onto his web browser.

Corrupt this

Watch your step. Carry a baseball bat at all times. If you get an invitation to bring Acrobat up to date, check that it is genuine and what you are installing – even if it is a kosher upgrade you may find that you have Chrome as your default browser afterwards if you do not carefully uncheck the necessary boxes.

Still in the Spares Box, with Mike and Whiskers

Whiskers developing his technique - in fact, I imagine Whiskers as rather more bald than this

Almost exactly two years ago, I scored one of my biggest-ever hauls on eBay, and bought in a load of ECW figures which came from the estate of a chap in Northern Ireland who had recently died - his entire collection, which was enormous, was sold by a local charity shop. I only bought a stack of his ECW troops - all SHQ and Tumbling Dice 20mm - but there were literally hundreds of them.

The big surprise at the time was that they had very obviously been painted up and organised to fight Montrose's campaigns - since that was exactly what I wanted them for, I had seen that there were a lot of Scottish troop types in the collection, but it wasn't until I started checking out the flags that I realised what I had.

The figures were quite nicely painted, in a very plain style, but I was a bit shocked to see that they had been heavily coated with some kind of ship's varnish - these figures were definitely intended to stand up to some severe, industrial handling, I would say. I set about identifying figures which would restore most easily, and which were of most immediate use for my Montrose project, and I did some retouching, and a great deal of applying matt varnish to tone down the finish, and rebasing, and I was pleased with the results. The episode generated a lot of very plain, rather dull Scottish and Irish soldiers, which provided a fine addition to bulk up the splendid Covenanter units which Lee Gramson had already painted up for me.

All good - I've done some Montrose things now, and intend to revisit this again soon. While I was spending a few late nights in 2014, getting these ex-eBay fellows ready for the armies, I got to know the previous owner a bit better. Of course, I have no idea who he was, but at 1 a.m. when I was preparing figures for the prescribed matt varnish I would find myself chatting to him - I called him Mike, in the absence of other suggestions.

"Well, Mike," I would say, "this one's got cat hairs stuck on the varnish as well - you should keep old Whiskers out of the painting room.." and so on. I developed a technique of loosening the cat hairs from the varnish with the tip of a penknife, and then removing them with tweezers. A strange way to spend a long evening - this is almost certainly why I started talking to Mike. As time went on, it became a house joke that I had gradually changed my mind, and that I now believed that Whiskers had done the varnishing himself - perhaps with a little guidance from Mike.

Well the horses are pretty ghastly, but they should paint up simply enough, and that
gives me the better part of two new regiments of rather understated Northern horse

Since I've recently been rooting around in the Spares Box, I found another load of the ex Mike & Whiskers ECW boys, and I realised that there are a lot more in the heap which would usefully restore in the same way. So for a couple of evenings I've been washing and debasing and removing the cat hairs. Since these figures are probably a bit worse than the ones I selected for refurbing last time, there are a lot more cat hairs - in fact I have now begun to believe that Mike did the varnishing, but that he applied the varnish with Whiskers, rather than a brush.

And oodles more artillerymen - just the job for the sieges - more than enough...

It's going OK - we are now ready for a bit of touch-up, and then the matt varnish can start. I need to paint up a few extra cavalry figures from scratch, to make up the numbers, but I hope to get a couple of additional Scottish/Northern units of horse out of this, and I will have more gunners than I will ever possibly need - certainly I will have plenty to man the forthcoming extra artillery for siege games.

Topic #2 - more pottery ornaments ready for sieges...

I previously gave a glimpse of some of my new Tey Pottery houses - this little side-project is shaping up very nicely, and I have the makings of a presentable 17th Century English town centre, such as I can lay siege to. So here's a slightly bigger glimpse...

Cue the Spares Box, plus a World of MDF

All a matter of balance - and special equipment...

I have received the first prototype Thing (not sure what it is – a buttress, a pedestal, a support…?) to enable garrison units to stand on a walkway on the walls that is narrower than the subunit bases. My ECW Foote are on 60mm x 60mm squares, but the walkways are about 20mm wide – you can see the problem. The prototype seems to work OK – Michael has produced a build-it yourself kit in 2mm MDF which glues together to give a block 50mm wide, 48mm high and 23mm deep, and I attach a piece of steel paper to the top. Since my unit bases are all finished with magnetic compound, this should be a big help. I have glued-up and painted the prototype in a delicate stone shade, as you see, so that it blends in a bit (i.e. looks less stupid than you would expect). It should even be possible to mount artillery on the walls if I use the Things two-deep. Now I need a supply of about 20, plus I need a good name for a Thing.

The Thing

Troops on The Thing

Call out the trusty Spares Box. It also occurred to me that it would be useful to have some musketeers mounted in single rank, on half-depth bases, specially for siege and fortress work. It seems a bit of a grunt to paint some up just for this role (and I’d begrudge the use of figures which could be made up into proper battlefield units), but the Spares Box came into its own. A while ago I bought some old painted ECW figures from Harry Pearson, and some of them are from the very earliest “Subscription” series which Les Higgins made before his more famous centrifugally-cast 20mm range (of which I use a great many). The early figures are interesting because they are seldom seen, but for me they are a bit puny in stature to mix comfortably with the later ones. However, for isolated special-purpose siege stands they could be just the thing, so I did some (minimal) touching-up and revarnishing, and mounted them up on 30mm-deep stands. They could never be accused of possessing actual beauty, but I expect they will do as they are told. In any case, given their age and history, it would be sad for them to live in the Spares Box forever.

Surprised to find themselves on special duties - "Subscription" Les Higgins ECW

They can do it without The Thing

While I was looking in the Spares Box, I was also reminded that the ex-Harry figures also include some of the later Higginses which are in good nick and – with a few supplementary figures painted to match, should provide me with 3 new units of foote – there are some red-coated fellows who will give me a decent double-sized unit for Francis Gamul’s City of Chester regiment – there’s that siege theme again…

I also have prototypes for some of the new MDF structures which will form the basis of my trench sections, but more of that on another occasion. I also have some MDF pieces which will provide a pretty radical solution to the placement of rivers on my hex-grid table. I’ll get some painted up – this week, I hope – and there will be some pictures (unless they are terrible, in which case I shall just change the subject – good heavens, is that an elephant in the garden…?).

The river system is that I paint up some 2mm-thick hexes to be water – good gloss varnish finish and all that – I’m still pondering the best colour for water, by the way – I tend towards mud rather than sky-blue, but I am open to ideas. Then I have a series of bags of extra parts laser-cut from 2mm MDF, painted in baseboard green, which sit on top of the water hexes, and are painted on both sides to give maximum flexibility. The bags are labelled “cheeks – straight”, “cheeks – inners” and “cheeks – outers” and that sort of describes the system – there are two different profiles for a straight (a bit wiggly, these are not canals) and two profiles for a curve. Each river piece connects at the edge, with a 2-inch wide river in the middle of a (4-inch) hex edge. Using the cheek-pieces in different combinations, it is possible to produce a wide range of river shapes, and you can even make estuaries, lakes or a coastline. Until I get more to fiddle about with, I do not know the full extent of what is possible, but it seems very promising. When I have a decent number of pieces painted up, I’ll try to put together a post to demonstrate this.

Not painted yet, but this quick mock-up gives an idea of the scope, with a
very small number of alternative shapes - does anyone else remember
Slartibartfast? It may have occurred to you that the cut-out bits which are
missing from this picture are - well, roads! - aha....

I’ve had problems with rivers since I started wargaming, and hexes are just a specific variation on that theme. The new rivers, by the way, will not be the slightest bit dioramic – these are to be flat, tidy, obvious rivers that you can stand a unit or a bridge on without everything falling over. Like an oversized version of Commands & Colors terrain tiles, in fact.

Hooptedoodle #211a - Icarus Allsorts

Further to yesterday's quotation - thanks for emails and comments - it was, as most people stated, a line from Joni Mitchell's Amelia (which I think is from the Hejira album).

Here's Joni, live at Wembley in 1983, with a little help from Michael Landau near the end. Joni is a little bit like Marmite - most people either love her or hate her - I've always been a big fan, though I confess she was sometimes a bit of a shrieker in her early years. I'm intrigued by this clip - if it is from a published DVD then it is one I can't trace - I know there is a CD of the show, but I've never seen it on film before. If you know anything about a DVD, I'd appreciate a nudge.

This is Joni at the height of her powers, I guess, and she had a hell of a band for that tour - apart from Landau, there was Russell Ferrante on keyboards (he of Yellowjackets fame), her husband, Larry Klein, on bass and Vinnie Colaiuta on drums. Monsters.

I was gently taken to task for my reference yesterday to the use of a Google search to trace the quote - it was rightly suggested that my turn of phrase was inelegant and impolite and not at all appropriate. I apologise unreservedly; the wording was not in keeping with normal blogging etiquette, and I shall take care in future to avoid all reference to Google. Sorry about that.

[Boring muso bit: if anyone plays guitar and is wondering what on earth Ms Mitchell is doing here, it should be noted that, as with everything else, she has her own way of tuning the thing - it is tuned C-G-C-E-G-C, which gives an interesting sound, though it is not recommended if you wish to play Albeniz, or Wes Montgomery for that matter.]