Well now, it's been a little long since the last posting. In that time I have completed half of my cork terrain tiles. They look great so far.
So i put a brigade of finished 6mm Irregular French Infantry on the board with a brigade of 6mm paper French Infantry and took a few snaps. The lead definitely looks the part. Unfortunately the price to compile and the time to paint and base do not. So back the paper it is, permanently this time.
Now for the real decision. After playing around with the green background to the images I felt the white background works better. Here's why. The green makes the artwork look a little more like a set of miniatures on the table. Good. But. When you 1st walk into the room or sneak a peak at a photo, the green tends to really blend in to the artwork and it takes a while to seperate the image from the green. If the same is done with white background you can almost instantly see the blue and white for french and red and grey for english. And so the final decision was made for me.
Looks passible I think. At least enough to cover the expense of purchasing, painting and basing multiple armies of napoleonics anyway!
Hooray! The too and fro of decision making is over and I can now get on with the production of the armies.
On to the artwork I go. The image I used is from the Junior General forums and is shown on this blog previously but here it is again.
From which I extract:
and with a little refining result in:
Very acceptable I think. Now to create a brigade or 2. Stay tuned!
7 comments:
You stated "The lead definitely looks the part. Unfortunately the price to compile and the time to paint and base do not."
Yeah, but the "real" miniatures look 1000x better than the paper ones. To me it's definitely worth the time and price to compile and base the "real thing".
On a positive note, your terrain looks great! I've priced out cork tiles around here and they're too expensive in relation to other materials (like foam or MDF board).
Hey Dave
I agree the lead does look 1000x better but my project will campaign all the armies for Waterloo, then all the armies for Russian invasion and then all armies for fictional campaign. That's a lot of lead when 1 battalion costs around $8 each and takes about 3 hours to paint and base. And I really hate painting.
Compare that to about 2 hours to print and assemble 1 whole A4 sheet of troops with gives me about 2 whole divisions.
I will probably build paper armies and slowly replace them with lead over time. But the problem is that I will also be starting a 6mm Sci Fi campaign, a 6mm SYW campaign and more than likely a few others.
Yeah the cork tiles are more expensive. I pay $11 for a set of 6 from Bunnings (which I think is similar to your Home Depot). I have tried MDF and foam but I found the cork tiles are the only thing that comes precut to 300x300 and is actually square. When I got mdf cut to size from Bunnings I would end up with 2 or 3 peices 297 x 301 or something like that. Don't work for 6mm. Leaves too much of a noticable gap.
Actually, I noticed one of the local craft stores publishes a 40% off 1 item coupon practically every week. So I could slowly assemble cork terrain over several months. I really like the method of using 2 layers for standard height terrain and then cutting the first layer to make rivers. It's similar to how GHQ's Terrain Maker(tm) styrofoam hexes does it. Normal flat terrain is done on 1/2" thick hexes but rivers on done by cutting the river banks out of a 1/4" thick hex and gluing that to another 1/4" thick hex.
Yeah GHQ is one of the main sites that inspired that system. I tried it with foamboard 1st and it worked well but I could never cut square enough. That's why the cork tiles are so good. They are all precut to exactly 300 x 300 and amost 100% square. I've nearly finished the whole 6 x 4 gaming area and will post pics of it soon.
Looks like you are making good progress with the paper now David. I agree that the white background looks better (at least in the photos) and lets you see the "figure" much better. By the way, what rules do you use for Napoleonics anyway?
I like a colored background. When I saw green though, it didn't make "sense" to me. The sky is blue...as in sky blue. Why not make a light blue background?
-> Larry
I use Empire V rules with a few mods from research. It plays really well and allows me to field a couple of corps and still be able to have an elite battalion defending a church courtyard or whatever.
-> John
I did try blue earlier on but it looked worse than the green.
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