The Beard Bunker

This is going to be one of those posts which is really four separate posts too small to exist on their own: How to quickly add a background image to your mini photos without having to have a physical background. Hint: it's technically similar to how they shot The Mandalorian  but infinitely cheaper and with almost no skill. Things I learned while kitbashing regular Intercessors with Assault Intercessors. Some notes on my latest attempt at a middle eastern skin tone. A short story about how Sergeant Oreas Cassander earned his thunder hammer. Adding background images to your photos This is comically simple: load a suitable image on your PC's monitor, put some scenery and your dudes in front of your PC monitor, and take a photo. Bonus points if you do a better job than me of matching the lighting levels of the minis versus the monitor. This essentially gives you infinite backgrounds, and in retrospect I've no idea why I didn't think of this sooner. Particularly given that

I did it, I totally finished these buildings before getting distracted by Dark Angels (Honest). I'm still waiting for the vehicles to arrive, once they do I'll do a proper 15mm photo shoot with the infantry and tanks etc, but for now here is the scenery.  Step One: Undercoat. This was done with some cheap brown Plasticoat. I picked brown as it provides a good base colour for most of the following steps and means I can skip a step. Step Two: Basecoat/Dry Brush Walls. Before slapping paint on to the exterior walls I did a little bit of research and found a wall paint colour chart, in French, from 1930. Basically struck research gold. I can't share it as I don't know who the image belongs to but a little dig around on should bring it up. The walls got a heavy drybrush. Neatness not required.  Step Three: Dry Brush Walls. Again, this time with a mix of the base colour and white. This was applied with downward strokes only over the top half/third of the building. This should

 I've been getting an itch. A tiny tiny itch. We've been looking at doing some historical WW2 gaming in 15mm with more emphasis on vehicles and vehicle manovers. Due to the current logisical whoopies that is the British postal system the vehicle models have been delayed. What did arrive was a whole load of MDF buildings in 1/100 or 15mm scale.  These came from TTCombat and I managed to get 15 of them for around the same price as a slightly excitable takeaway. I decided that I was going to go for the ruined buildings because I think it'll look more interesting and will be fun to play over.  The buildings are nice, but straight out of the box they lack a certain something something. So I set about making them a little less clean and tidy. In today's post I'm going to go through the modelling steps and once I've painted them I'll go through the painting steps. What I am going to show you can be applied to any setting and any building. Just simply adjust the st

Back in September 2020 I made an automated campaign roster for 40K's new Crusade mode. It's a Google sheet formatted for ease of use on smartphones (for obvious practical reasons). It's since become one of the Bunker's most read posts, and thousands of people have apparently started using this thing. This was very much a pleasant surprise, with very kind shout outs in both the Independent Characters Podcast and the 40K Badcast  as well as some top-notch signal boosting from the  Goonhammer  Goons. The main benefit of so many people checking it out is that some of them have sent in extremely useful feedback, and so I've just finished implementing a bunch of improvements. Credit in particular goes to the extremely helpful Jonathan ( @jjarcher89  on Instagram). Click the image below to head to the original post , and scroll down to the bottom of the post to see the changelog for version 1_3 to see if it's of interest to you and your wee crusading dudes.