There was no intention of using them as drawers as such but they have proved very good as hanging displays which was my intent. What to do with the removed drawers? Well you can judge for yourself if you think they would – with some paint and customisation – work as habitats and buildings for a city table top.
I have also assembled and glued together a bunch of the drawers to create yet more display ‘cases’.
Anyway, the intent of this post was to highlight the availability of these to folk not aware of them yet – I think £15 a pretty fair price for what you get.
I remain stumped with how best to approach multi-basing 15mm for Hordes of the Things (HotT) and DBA whilst still retaining individually based miniatures. A future, and no doubt longer and inconclusive, post will follow at some point on that specific subject.
However, not all game systems are quite so tight on the basing criteria. A recent foray in to Of Gods and Mortals (OGAM) by Ganesha Games is pretty flexible on both size and shape of unit bases. So a few experiments based on magnetic bases with regards to HotT led me to try something similar.
The brief:
Flexible for various base sizes (infantry on washers, pennies and steel-paper based squares, cavalry on steel-paper based rectangles and tuppences or washers – i.e. all with magnetic properties).
Flexible enough that casualty removal is an option and unit sizes can vary yet still ‘look’ okay.
Strong enough magnetically that miniatures can be transported on the unit bases (which is also based with steel-paper for transporting in file boxes lined with magnetic sheets).
In the end I made two sizes. The one pictured is the larger and can accommodate around 8 cavalry or 12 or so infantry. The smaller is about half the size. Note – these are for “Open Order” troops in OGAM. I have the rectangular 60mm x 40mm (and other depths) for “Close Order” units (see Future Post regards HotT/DBA basing…).
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.
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.
The results on that occasion were less “Wow” and more “Nae Bad” (Scot dialect for okay). Subsequently Vinyl printing at Pixartprinting came around again so I thought I’d have another run at it.
Aside from a couple of standard “roll ’em out and use ’em” mats (images below) I thought I’d try something a bit more ‘flexible’ as well this time. Gaming tiles.
Not a new idea by any means – I’ve made many homespun ones before as will many of you. They work well but the print quality is always going to be restricted by the quality of your printer. Likewise durability by the stock you can print on to. I used to have a great colour laser which was great for this type of printing but it died a few years ago. The inkjet that replaced it, while a good machine, wasn’t so suitable for this purpose. Add to that, some stock that I used wasn’t totally ‘official’ and colour fade to a pinkish hue not long after printing (and all the work involved with trimming and mounting on to foamcore). Imagine how annoying the same result had on carefully built card building models! Grrr.
On the left, a double tile using the vinyl printing, on the right, one I made earlier using my own printer. In this case it is clear that this is one of the printed stock that suffered from the discolouration I mention above.
So, a few of the images below will at first appearance look odd. Big vinyl sheets with randomly dotted terrain on it (see the coastal set). These were laid out in Photoshop before going off to print to minimise the amount of cutting required and to get as much bang for your buck (i.e. you don’t send off thirty 12″x12″ bits of art to print but one big sheet).
For example. here’s a screenshot of the artwork that went off to print for the City tiles. One big file. One big sheet.
With the coastal one I was looking to get from the big sheet a 3’x3′ plain ‘water’ mat (hence the appearance of pirate and viking ships!). The actual coastal areas and land areas were to be sliced into individual tiles to be used either in conjunction with the ‘water’ or in their own right.
Worked out well.
The City banner, whilst it ‘looks’ like a laid out ready-to-use mat, was always intended for slicing. Which you can see in the later pics. The reason for that was – if the slicing proved problematic then I’d at least be left with a City mat that could be used. The cutting and subsequent mounting was not a problem though.
I touched on this in an earlier post but thought the subject deserved a little more dedicated attention and pictures.
Vinyl printing for mat and tiles have worked. I also tried Flag material when Pixelartprint ran a sale on that medium a while ago. I’m sharing the results here by way of a comparison and my view that they are ‘not as effective’ as vinyl printing was.
Flag Material Wargame Mat: Desert
Not sure why I placed some mounted terrain tiles on the left side of the mat for this pic. I think I was checking the colour match and possibly how it would look if ‘elevated’ terrain.
A Battle Systems portal.
Flag Material Wargame Mat: Frostgrave Themed Winter Mat
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’.
I’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?→
Miniature figure collector and painter (in that order) and solo wargamer whose opponent has lost his gaming mojo
Loading Comments...
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
Continue reading A consideration for displaying your painted miniatures 
