Category Archives: Dave Graffam

Practical scenic backdrops for gaming table “Dead Zones”

Some of you may recall from an earlier post an early ‘test’ at creating a backdrop for one of my fantasy city terrain boards. Link to post.

Here is a pic.

Fantasy Town City Wargames terrain print your own battle maps
Started playing around with making a scenic backdrop. Getting there…

The effort composed simply of Photoshopping some matching Dave Graffam art with some perspective artwork found online in order to achieve a sense of continuation from the ‘playable’ board. As you can see from the photo this works quite well and deserved further exploration.

However, it did have one draw back – backdrop or not aside, when placing terrain against a ‘dead table end’ like this does create a lot of dead space around that set terrain (i.e. you have a full depth building jutting against a wall where only the frontage is going to be useful in game terms).

Model Railway enthusiasts conquered this issues aeons ago for the same reasons with ‘low relief’ terrain/models. In effect, cut the terrain in half.

So with that in mind, combining the previous efforts with Photoshop and slicing a number of pre-built Graffam models in half, I made a panel that both compliments the terrain on the board and still plays an active, yet less intrusive, part in the game space. Pretty pleased with the result.

Dave Graffam Paper Model Terrain Dave Graffam Paper Model Terrain Continue reading Practical scenic backdrops for gaming table “Dead Zones”

More Terrain Mat experiments, Prang and Desert Felt…eh?

Warning – image heavy post here. Illustrating a few things here (but kinda got snap-happy on this post to be honest).

In the pics below:

Terrain Mat (Flag Material)
Following the success of some Vinyl Terrain Mat printing via PixartPrinting, a subsequent sale came along for printed Flag Fabric. This made me think of what I’d read about Cigar Box cloth mats and some others that manufacturers were starting to produce.

Well, I had various art files floating around and thought I’d take a punt as it was only a few pounds to get these printed and shipped from Italy. The desert terrain mat in the pictures below are one of the ‘mats’.

Terrain mat flag material felt fields 15mm Prang vs Rogue Star Motley Crew of Spacefarers and TroublemakersI’ll maybe do a longer post about this in due course should I take pics of the other two “Flags” (one was Heroic Maps Frost Ruins and the other a larger town layout based of Dave Graffam art) but in brief, here are the conclusions;

  • cheap
  • light-weight, perhaps too light, but light enough that hills etc can be placed with some effect underneath
  • slightly transparent, which also means a loss in vibrancy of colour and saturation
  • as you can see from some of the closer images, there is a pattern to the fabric but to be honest, this is not really visible in situ and not really a deal breaker for me

Over all – a bit mixed. Not as overwhelming successful as the vinyl mats but certainly usable.

The Prang make an appearance
I had promised photos of these guys to Gavin at 15mm.co.uk/Ion Age sometime ago. They’ve been done for a while but not photographed. These are not the ‘mini’ photos – they were handy while messing with the table – but they featured quite effectively I think in this desert environment. Proper pics to follow GBS, and Eli, promise. I think they turned out quite well. Continue reading More Terrain Mat experiments, Prang and Desert Felt…eh?

A City for All Scales: Fantasy Town follow-up

Posting this for the sake of being a completest – I spent some more time ‘evolving’ the fantasy town that I was messing around with on the post I made on the vinyl map printing – so I thought I’d record the finished thing here (if there ever is such a thing in this hobby).

At first glance you won’t notice a huge difference. I’ve replaced some of the smaller ‘true 15mm’  resin buildings with more Graffam houses. These ones are a little less ’15mm’ and more HO/OO or even 25mm in a couple of cases. Here’s the logic – by mixing scales a bit you can;

  • get a certain sense of perspective and irregularity of scale variation across the whole town
  • create (or undermine) a sense of ‘true scale’ thus making the terrain feasible with multiple scales (you’ll see a couple of shots with 25/28mm minis in there)
  • using mostly Graffam and paper models, get a better sense of architectural style. Some of the previous building just ‘jarred’ with the dominating theme.

Anyway, enough blether. Pics.

Graffam paper model fantasy town 15mm
Vampires and Hunters battle it out.
Graffam paper model fantasy town 15mm
I’ve got a post in mind showing the use of some of the old Usborne cut-out-terrain books. These stalls are from a couple of them. HO/OO

Continue reading A City for All Scales: Fantasy Town follow-up

City Town Terrain for Mordheim or Frostgrave fantasy games

I’m not a terribly focussed terrain builder/maker as is probably evident from the end results of my tables. They tend to evolve and acquire increasing amounts of clutter over time without a great deal of consideration for consistency – I’ll mix resin, plastic, card, paper and foam core with 2d and 3d to suit.

The base for this table are 10″ square wooden panels. They were cut down from ‘left-over’ slotted panels used on wooden wine cases that I use as shelving for paints and miniature storage. They have a magnetic sheet covering and on top of that I printed out a portion of Pwork Darkburg paper terrain battlemap. Very Mordheim in flavour.

Some of the buildings and features appeared on another recent ‘Fantasy Venice’ attempt which follows a similar theme to this setup.

City Town Terrain for Mordheim or Frostgrave fantasy games
Some German Infantry (plastic HO/20mm scale) test out some Dave Graffam paper ruin terrain that has been based and bulked up with foam core. In the foreground a lone Splintered Light hero awaits a Blue Moon werewolf’s advances.

Continue reading City Town Terrain for Mordheim or Frostgrave fantasy games