The Beard Bunker

It's been five years since I invested in some tiny resin real estate from Tabletop World (the guard tower , thanks for remembering). Their kits remain a joy to paint. So long as one is familiar with a drybrush, one is in for an easy ride. Today's post is really just a few photos of the finished thing, with a few tips on the most interesting elements of the painting. Using a brown primer The one change I made to the usual "prime black and start drybrushing" method was to prime with TT Combat's Laser Cut Brown spray. Arguably it's too rich and red a brown to serve as a universal undercoat, and one can tone it down by slapping a quick bodge-brushed layer of Vallejo's burnt umber over the top, but overall that brown tone really added some warmth to the stone. I'll definitely repeat this with the next building but it's a bit intense on the wood, so next time I'll hit all the wood areas with the burnt umber before proceeding to the drybrushing. Paint...

The rule for the Bunkerettes this year is simple: finish old projects, don't start new ones. I broke the rule. Oops. In my defence, there was a UK webstore selling Tabletop World's Guard Tower for a reasonable price, which meant no epic wait for the thing to come all the way from Croatia, and no chunky VAT charges. Furthermore, said UK retailer ( http://zealotminiatures.com ) only had one left in stock. My sweaty little fingers could hardly whip out my credit card quickly enough. I know, I know... I've got problems. Having broken The Rule, it became a matter of honour that this 16" architectural wang should get painted damn fast. As soon as I finished my Frostgrave warband , I stuck to a rule of doing at least one stage on the tower every evening. This often meant spending only fifteen minutes painting, so I didn't get daunted by the hugeness of the building and just plugged away at it for a month in little bitesize chunks.  At last I finished, ...

We here at the bunker often talk about the hobby butterfly. Like the butterfly we are drawn, powerfully and inextricably toward something beautiful and all consuming. It takes over our hobby desire so completely. We throw ourselves into that project and immerse ourselves in its beautiful nectar. For a short while. Until we catch the alluring scent of the next bloom and we find ourselves floating towards that next shiny thing. So then what happens to all those forgotten flowers? All those neglected blooms? All those undercoated Orks? They sit on shelves, or packed into cardboard boxes stuffed under the stairs. They slowly gather dust, hoping for the day when they will feel the sweet caress of a brush and given their time in the sun. When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils I’m certain, if you are anything like me, this will be a familiar story. You will have those projects that started with such zeal only to wither and dry out like daffodils left on th...

As a rampant hobby butterfly, I'm much better at starting new and ambitious things than I am at finishing them. Everything I start is doomed to WIP-shelf relegation as a new sexy project tempts me away. Mounds of basecoated or half-assembled things lean against each other in boxes, exchanging disappointed glances and wondering if their time in the sun will come. Screw that. If 2017 is even a patch on 2016, we're going to need escapism and endorphins in equal measure, which means getting stuff done, gods dammit! To that end, as promised at the end of my post on the merchant's house , here is the blacksmith forge from Tabletop World . It amazes me that this kit is just four components. It's like a diorama that requires almost no assembly. What I will say is that Jeff was wise to mount his on a base - the joins connecting the smithy to its house have patchy contacts. I got over this with an enthusiastic application of thick super glue, but struc...

Two of Tabletop World's beautiful buildings have sat unpainted on my scenery shelf for long enough that I don't even remember how many years I've had them for. If the Dwarves have the Great Book of Grudges, I have the Great Book of Unfinished Shames. Thanks to a looming deadline and the continuing hobby bender initiated by Total War: Warhammer as described in my last post, another Shame can be struck from the book: the merchant's shop . Note: when I took this photo, I didn't notice that the 1st floor wasn't sitting on the ground floor properly, hence the visible gap on the right balcony support strut. I mention it purely because I wouldn't want to make Tabletop World look bad on account of my doziness. As with the other two tabletop world buildings wot I done painted, these models have such crisp casting and sculpting that they're just satisfying to paint. With this latest one I've introduced a little tonal variation to ...

Some time ago I posted a review of Tabletop World’s townhouse and cottage : In the eight months between then and now, the interior detail (not to mention the little bits of resin furniture) sat on my shelf looking sad. As much as they all looked very pretty, I didn’t have any impetus to finish them. It’s not like you need a cheese board for games of Warhammer . Moreover, having the interior detail didn't seem that useful for roleplay scenarios; I only tend to want a visual representation of the area when the environment or number of characters is too complex to keep track of in the mind’s eye... and that seems unlikely to happen in a one-room cottage. Once I started painting the interiors, though, I got really into it. Given the sharpness and quality of the models, it was easy to get a satisfying result using pretty basic techniques. First up, here’s the inside of the cottage: Somewhat ridiculously, there was a point where I found myself paint...

Some of you may be familiar with Tabletop World , but for those of you who aren’t: they’re two dudes based in Croatia who make ridiculously detailed 28mm fantasy terrain. Behold: Le Townhouse Le Cottage Pretty, no? Here’s the other facings of the buildings:     Assembly Since these were resin pieces, I was braced for Forgeworld levels of assembly, that is to say sturm, drang, and much gnashing of teeth in pursuit of beauty. Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that these buildings require no assembly whatsoever. They come in two parts, building and roof. See? It just lifts off. The only ‘assembly’ I did was just the usual resin preparation, i.e. washing the components to get any releasing agents off the mould, and filling a couple of bubbles with green stuff. You may also be wondering what the point of having a lift-off roof might be. That, milord, would be a fully sculpted interior. Ahhhh yeahhh . Since these buildings ...