SdKfz 166 Sturmpanzer Brummbär

 

This is, I believe, yet another Bergman 1:100 model that I've printed on my Mars Pro for my 15mm WWII wargames. It's the SdKfz 166 Sturmpanzer, called "Brummbär" by Americans who studied captured examples during the war, but apparently that name wasn't in use with the Germans themselves.

There are a variety of camouflage schemes it could be painted in, but I elected to go for overall dunkelgelb since I wanted to weather it fairly heavily, and it would be cluttered enough without also adding a disruptive pattern.

In this scale the model is about 60mm long by 25mm tall.

15mm Walled Garden

 

While I was organising my workroom today, I found some pieces of wall that I found somewhere (probably Thingiverse) and printed a very long time ago, and thought I should probably actually do something with them.

They were intended, I think, to be the surrounding walls for a cemetary, or maybe a walled garden. I've chosen to go with the walled garden enclosure, since a bunch of headstones would tend to get in the way of placing troops inside the walls.

I glued them together and put them on a piece of heavy card, with the edges chamfered down thin. I added some rubble and vegetation flock, slapped on some paint, and bing-bong-bosh, there's another piece of terrain for 15mm soldiers to hide behind on a wargames table.

I've included a 15mm PSC German 81mm mortar team, for scale.

Old Stone Ruins

 

These is another terrain piece from Printable Scenery, cut into two pieces and printed on my Ender 3 at 0.2mm layer height in eSun PLA+. I printed it using Tom Tullis' terrain profile for Cura 5, but if I were to do it again I'd bump up the number of walls to three or four, as the columns proved to be quite fragile and broke off easily when I (repeatedly) dropped the pieces.

I began (after gluing everything back together again) by priming everything black, and then spraying a downwards zenithal white to define shadows and highlights. In retrospect, the zenithal spray could probably have been skipped, as the next painting step pretty much obliterated it.

I painted splotches of three colours all over everything: yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and Van Dyck brown, in roughly equal proportions. You can see the result in this photograph, and as I imagine you'd agree, at this stage it looks pretty awful. I used Maimeri gouache acrylics for this step, thinned down until they're quite liquid.

Once the spotty paint was dry, the next step was to over-wash everything with black.

This technique was originally developed for railway modellers' cliff faces and such-like, and it works better on plaster or similar absorbent material, as the paints and wash penetrate into the surface and the black wash evens out the tones a lot more. However, it still works on this unabsorbent plastic, if not quite as well.

Once the black wash has thoroughly dried, the next step is to dry-brush everything to knock back the darkness and bring out the edges to delineate the forms.

I used Vallejo VMC Buff for most of this, and then some VGC Elfric Flesh (a very pale off-white) to catch the upper edges.

After dry-brushing, I went over everything, stippling very thinned-down Elfric Flesh with a natural sea sponge, to give the weathered stone a bit of textural variation. Many areas got two or three layers of this treatment.

The terrain piece is usable just as it is, but a next step would be to add some moss and grass flocking in amongst the cracks of the paving and in various of the crevices.

Planescape 5e

 

It seems that WotC are re-releasing Planescape for D&D5e in 2023.

Planescape is one of those things that never really seemed to live up to its promise. I found the concept interesting, and I really enjoyed Tony diTerlizzi's art, but it didn't go as far into The Weirdness as I thought it should. I doubt that it will be any different this time around either, though 5e's nature as an over-the-top cinematic superhero game could suit it.

All of these D&D settings are, of course, heavily reliant on the DM for their realization, but I feel there's something missing from the Planescape milieu, and I don't know quite what that thing is.

Also, I absolutely hated the cutesy patois they scattered all through it.

Printable Scenery - Ruined Crypt

 

I bought and printed this model from Printable Scenery * some time ago, but have just got around to painting and flocking it.

It's scaled for use with 28mm miniatures, and printed on my Ender 3 at 0.2mm layer height in eSun PLA+.

* I can't find it on their website any more, but I expect it's there somewhere. Their catalogue is quite extensive these days.

** Ah, here it is: it's part of a set called Hallowed Mausoleums 

Humber Scout Car

 

I watched A Bridge Too Far again recently, while I was banged up in Covid Jail, and it occurred to me that what I really really need is a little 15mm JOE Vandeleur in his little 15mm Humber scout car.

I found a 1:56 Humber on Thingiverse that I could assemble into a one-piece model and rescale, so now all I had to do was sculpt a teensy-tiny Michael Caine to perch on it.