Hi, folks. A little update on the 15mm X-Com project. I finished the barn. It now has the interior stairs, hay bales, a corrugated roof, and I painted and stained the exterior wood on the second floor. The floors of all of the buildings are print-outs from "X-Com: Tactical", a very nice free
download from BoardGame Geek. X-Com: Tactical not only has the rules for playing X-Com on the tabletop, it also has some very nice 2-d graphics of the terrain, tokens, and ships. If the authors, Paul Pounds and Evan Leybourn, see this, thank you very much for making this excellent resource available.
The farmhouse is mostly finished. I need to finish the interior walls dividing the rooms, then it is done. The interior walls are mat board (I took a page from Vampifan's book). I will glue on some wood print-outs from the Fat Dragon Rio Draco set to simulate wooden interior walls and doors. The windows used for the farmhouse are 15mm resin from GameCraft Miniatures.
The stable is the last building for the farm board. I made it from craft sticks and gave it a corrugated metal roof. The roof is cereal card run through a crimper and glued to thin plasticard (that's how I did all of the rooves).
Also did a small UFO based on print-outs from "X-COM: Tactical" and pics from the interweb. The hull was made from a mixture of 1/2 inch quarter round wooden molding from a home improvement store and some Hirst Arts sci-fi bits. The interior bits are from Hirst Arts Sci-Fi bits, also.
I just received a couple of packs of Critical Mass Games excellent
Astragar Fighters to use as Snakemen. That's an idea I stole from ThorLongus when he posted his a while back. If mine come out half as nice as
his I'll be happy. So far I've got them primed and based. A few of them have been included in some of the pics for size comparison.
Hay bales. I made these from green pot scrubber pads. Painted them yellow, washed with Golden Brown craft paint, used a rubber coated black wire for the bale straps. They're a little larger than the ones in the X-Com: Tactical print-outs, but they'll work.
Stairs. The stairs were made using Dis's excellent tutorial
here.
This tutorial was a big help and I made 3 pretty nice stairways for the barn and farmhouse very quickly. Differences between mine and his are I needed to make my stairs much smaller to fit the template of the buildings. I used a 1/2 inch Hirst Arts brick between the stringers and only 1 thickness of thin plastic card for the stringers. Also, the scissors I used were an old pair of pinking shears my wife gave me, and I think the zig zag pattern is a little smaller than his. Otherwise, pretty much the same except his are much nicer.
I like the way you can fit the miniature's base between the steps to hold it in place. When I saw that pic of this feature on his blog I knew I had to try it. So, Thanks, Dis, for the excellent tutorial.
Well, that's all for now. I was able to pick up some extra shifts at the part-time job so I won't be blogging much for the next few days. Upcoming projects list just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Upcoming Projects:
X-COM
Post pics of Mutons
Cyberdisks
Chrysalids
Chrysalid-Zombies (These last three are gonna be from 15mm.co.uk)
Floaters
Ethereals
Thanks for looking.