Church of the ???

A few posts ago, I showed a church I had scratch built for Stange Aeons. I have now pretty much completed painting it up.

Instead of a steeple to hold some sort of emblem, I'm planning on painting a symbol on the wooden planks across the apex of the roof. I just haven't decided what to paint yet.


I know I was a bit heavy handed with the brown wash under the windows on this side.


Yep, that's the back of a building.


The mossy stuff on the roof & growing up the building is Underbrush from Woodland Scenics. Mason from Lead Adventure Forums used it on one of his buildings as ivy growth & I really liked it. It's a great way to make small growth in corners & around buildings.


The inside turned out a lot yellower than I intended, I was trying for a pine look. The side walls are plastic sheet, & the brush marks left in the paint ended up making it look a little like wood grain after I applied a brown wash.


Father Edmund can get a little messy some times.


& a quick shot of the steps down to the larder.


The interior dimensions of the building are pretty small, so I don't expect to do any actual gaming inside the church. But I'm very happy with how it come out, being my 1st attempt at a major scratch building project. I'm thinking there still needs to be some sort of symbol or mystic circle on the floor or wall behind the altar to finish the whole thing off.

I must say Skrapwelder helped out a lot. He gave me the resin roof & a lot of advice during the whole process.

New House on the Market

Below is my 1st serious attempt at scratch building a building. My only prior attempt was making the quick & easy hobo shacks featured in my 1st Strange Aeons post. But with Skrapwelder's guidance & gifts, & lots of shavings left all over the living room floor, I have completed the Church of the Eternal Flame/Eye/[insert your favorite ominous but abiguous adjective here].

The Church elders are keen recyclers, so are happy to use abandonded buildings for their meetings.

The church is a direct copy from the Plasticville Small Church. I picked one of those up, but decided I wanted a more American rural looking building with clapboard siding, instead of the rough stone or plaster siding that the Plasticville church had. So I traced the Plasticville church & used it as a template to build this one.

The wooden planking at the front roof eaves was originally a way to hide the fact that I'd trimmed too much off the peak of the roof, so there was a big gap there. But now I'm going to draw something on it, not sure what.

The roof is some resin extras that Skrapwelder kindly gave me.

Initially, the inside of the building look very rough, lots of badly cut foam core edges. So I decided to finish the windows & inside too. I added the planked floor & walls, & raised dais with the altar.

& every good church needs access to the crypts (or labyrinthian caverns) underneath the altar.

While it's not a Skrapwelder or Empey (http://a28mmbrain.blogspot.com/ ) original, I'm very happy with how it came out. Lots of fun to build. Now just have to paint it.

Squadrons and Knights and Horses, Oh My!

I've just finished up my annual fall project of making clothespin toys for the craft fair at my daughter's school. After lots of cutting, hot gluing, & painting, I was able to make 14 biplanes, 30 knights & 15 horses.

The knights & horses are made using the clothes pins specifically for making wooden clothespin dolls. I get the pins from Michaels craft store here in the US. They usually have a small wooden bits section in each store & the pins are from a company called Woodies.

This year I added axes & great swords to the knights arsenal.

Normally, I'd have a picture of some knights on horseback too. The legs of the knights are supposed to be able to slip over the horses backs. But for some reason, the horses' backs were wider this year & the knights wouldn't fit.

In years past, I ended up drawing the horses eyes so looking tried, worried or sad. This year some how I made them look mad or mean. These 4 horses look like a bunch of thugs planning a "grain silo" job.

Ponyboy confronts the Socs.

At first I thought these 2 could be Spy vs Spy until I realized the white one looked like an angry Snowy from TinTin.

The biplanes are made from the old style wooden clothespins. It was tough to find these, but I finally tracked them down at an Ace hardware store.

The all the toys took about 10 hours total to make. In addition to the knights not fitting on the horses, I other problems this year. I usually use Sharpie permanent markers to color the knights. But either the formulation of the ink changed, or the white primer I used had some weird chemical in it, or I had the worst luck with buying new pens, because every new pen I bought ended up drying up within about 3-4 minutes of use. I bought (& returned) 10 silver pens & they all stopped working pretty much immediately. I used to only need 2 silver pens to finish all 30 knights. So I ended up just painting the silver using a bright silver miniatures page.

To give proper attribution for these project, I got all my ideas from the Penny Whistle Blog.

Strange Aeons Cultists

I've been working on some scratch-built cultists for the Strange Aeons Cthulhu mythos skirmish game.

Here's the whole gang.

3 melee cultists with 1 cultist with a rifle

1 melee cultist, the cult leader (opposite colored hood & robe with a pistol), 1 cultist rifle, & 1 with a Thompson SMG

These are made from GW Skaven Plague Monks with putty hoods & their tail cut off to use as the face tentacles. Now I feel like the Farmer's Wife. I also bought some of the Mantic Games Veer-Myn tails from an online bits shop, so some of the cultists could have more than 1 tentacle. This idea of using Skaven for cultists & cutting of their tails came from Kid Kyoto who posted it on The Miniatures Page a few years ago. My only disappointment in making them is that I used GW's new Earthshade wash for the 1st on them, & it turned out way too dark on in the folds & bottom of the robe. Next up will either be my zombie-cthulhu mash ups, or some very unique figures for use as swarms or vermin.