Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The Rocky Road to Whiteville

The small, fictional town of Whiteville is finally coming into existence. Yeah, I know, there are several real Whitevilles out there, but this Whiteville is not on a Map. It's a peaceful place, probably somewhere near Pleasantville and it is the home of the Whiteface family. As you may have guessed all characters appearing in this blog are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living, dead or undead, is purely coincidental.

The last days I've been working on my road system. They are made from black 3mm PVC hard foam. Maybe 2mm would have been better, but 3mm was available in my local DIY store and they are easy to cut and won't warp after spray painting.

Pic. #1: T-Intersection, 40cm (about 16") long and 18cm (about 7") wide.

Pic. #2: A can of textured spray paint (do I have to translate Granit-Effekt?) from the DIY store. I expected that I would have to paint and dry-brush the roads afterwards, but they came out perfect.
Pic. #3: A sheet of rubber foam. I will need this in picture #4.
Pic. #4: I've glued a continous strip of 3mm wide rubber foam on a 40cm piece of wood (right side). This wasn't my best idea, because there was an annoying amount of warping. Afterwards I glued the next strip of rubber foam onto pieces of PVC hard foam and cut it until I had a full road length of 4cm rubber - 4cm gap - 4cm rubber etc. (left side). 
As visible in this (pretty dark) picture I used yellow and white paints (GW / Citadel) with these newly created stencils.

Pic. #5: Et voilà! A finished road. I could have never painted these road markings so perfectly un-perfect.
Pic. #6: A part of Whiteville. The crossroad is still without road markings. I've yet to work on a stencil for this.















 
I have to say, that I am pretty pleased how this turned out so far. The purchase of several Plasticville Buildings this year had a very positive effect on my motivation and I was fed up with improvised Zombie Wargaming. No more gaming on bluepints!

Thanks to Willy and Bryan for keeping me focussed on Zeds with their great batreps.

Whiteface

6 comments:

  1. Hey, you got a blog up! Good show.
    It is really looking nice, the roads are very impressive.
    I'm proud to say I'm your first follower and I will get you up on my blog list.
    Now, let's see some batreps for my viewing pleasure!

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  2. Welcome and thank you very much for your nice comment!

    Yesterday I told myself that if I wait until I have prepared and finished everything I'll never get to playing a campaign.
    So I grabbed some dice and now I am lost somewhere in the chaos of Day One.
    As supected my plan didn't survive the first enemy contact...

    Whiteface / Oliver

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  3. I'm glad to see that you have made a start on your campaign instead of waiting. This will surely motivate you to build/buy more scenery and add to your figure mountain (every gamer has a figure mountain, waiting to get painted!).

    I am very impressed with how well your roads have turned out. The markings have come out extremely well and they look very professional. Good work, Oliver!

    When I started playing ATZ with the original rules, I didn't have much in the way of scenery either. But I worked feverishly at making more and more WWG card models until I had enough to cover a small sized board. A few months later I began my blog and I haven't looked back. What I'm saying is that whilst your game board may look sparse now it will grow in time, so don't worry too much about it. What you have is great for a rural or suburban setting. Model railway buildings are a great solution and are often very cheap on E-Bay. As we Brits are fond of saying - just remember, Rome wasn't built in a day!

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  4. Oh, I am very good at buying. This is the part of the hobby that I am really proficient in.

    I could add some fantasy scenery including a castle. I've heard they have a lot of them medieval castles in the USA ;o)

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  5. Beautiful looking stuff you got there! Keep blogin' and I'll keep reading!

    -B

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  6. Thank you all for your nice comments. I still haven't done a stencil for the T-intersection / crossroad, but it will happen soon. At the moment I try to get the Whiteface family finished. I am not famous for finishing my miniatures, but Mr. Whiteface has just received a coat of matt varnish and Mrs. Whiteface is in the last steps of painting. Dotty...how can I paint her? It's not even sure if I have to paint her skin rosy or grey.

    Whiteface / Oliver

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