The Bunker: More Paint

More of a WIP this one but it gives an idea what I’m working towards to.

As stated before, this thing is modular, multi scale and multi period. This means painting a lot of different things to make it work. But, thx to the fact most of my blocks and plates are reversible, this doenst mean chopping extra wood 🙂

The next 2 pics will illustrate this, and show my progress as of late.

In the left top corner you see a stairway I made quite a while back, and while very usefull it is also heavy…not the way I had intended to go, but for now it will do as I have no other stairways planned apart from a few loose ones to set up against the walls. Again, a reversible item, and in that way it looks like a stairway going down….a unexpected bonus.

The red containers u see are part of my Bunker filler project, more about that on a later date, again.

The Imperial Aquila (for those of U that play GW games not an unfamilliar sight) is another test to see if I can make a few more complex pieces on the reverse sides of the blocks and plates. So far so good, I guess, though it’s a WIP, and most certainly not done, but I like it.

Thats it again for now, but more soon, thats a promise 😉

Johan

The Bunker: Third Step: Wood to Paint

Sure, having a 150+ blocks lying around the house and parts for another 100 is fun…and disheartening at the same time, so I stored the lot in several big boxes and focussed on other things (more about that later)

A few weeks ago though, I walked past the local home improvent store, and noticed a big sign with “Closing sale – 30-50% discount” on it. Never one to pass a bargain I went in and came out with, amongst other things, a overly large bucket of grey wood primer/basecoat/ you know what I mean. And that weekend, I opened one of the boxes, dragged the lot back upstairs and sanded and cleaned the parts in preparation for an evening of nothing but basing. One box, lot of wood, nothing better to do equals a lot of pre-finished tiles.

So you’ve got yourself a stack of grey painted modules….then grab your pencil and put down a grid on each module, and repreat that proces on the walls and underneath most of the parts as well. Again, a lot of work, and not every position was easy to reach, but I did manage to get the first 25 blocks done this way, so I can now sit down after dinnertime to relax for an hour or so painting concrete. Jay…..

In order to speed up that process a bit but still get convincing concrete I looked at….concrete :). Do you have any idea how much that stuff varies? As it will be the inside of a bunker mostly I went with a white-blue-grey -ish mix of colours, settling on the following colours, namely : VMC 164 Dark Bluegrey for the basewash and VMC 153 Pale Greyblue or VMC 156 US Bluegrey Pale for the whitish look. No mixing whatsoever, all the diff in colour you see is done by changing the amount of water in the paint mix and leaving it on the board for anything as short as 5 seconds to a minute. The longer u wait the more pronounced the white lines will be. VMC 164 Dark Bluegrey was used to accentuate some of the lines between the concrete, but not everywhere. I’ll propably do a Tutorial for this at a late date.

Here are a few examples:

I have plenty of variation in the concrete, depending on my mood and time the concrete can look anything from pristine to sloppy….but it all ties in together just as I had hoped, and paints up rather quickly…thank God.

Johan

The Bunker: Second step: Paper to wood

With all of the parts I then wanted cut and glued together I ended up with these boxes and variations thereof:

The 10×20 block is one I made to save myself the time to make 2 smaller 10×10 blocks. Not included in this shot are 10×10 filler blocks with no walls whatsoever as a sheet of wood looks like…a sheet of wood 😆

Johan

The Bunker: First step: Thoughts to paper

The first step went sort of like this…..a quick sketch on a piece of paper, nothing more….
An idea in my head put to paper, left on my fridge so that the idea would stick and remembered. My first idea was, and is, to make a area suitable to represent a U-boat bunker. That means concrete, high walls, a area for a sub, room for tools, torpedoes and a big old armoured door. That is what the drawing you see represents, the start of the U-boat bunker.

But, this is a big piece. Modular, yes, but big. My basic goal is an area for 20mm models, 2nd choice is 28mm.

So I scaled it down into components, dabbled a bit with sizes and decided to go with a 10×10 cm square sheet of 6mm MDF as a base for everything else. This I used for making the next set of drawings.

These drawings used 10×20 tiles mostly, single back wall or corner, to create the idea of a pen. No doors, no details, no nothing yet.

Hey, it’s a start! 🙂

Johan

First post

Well, it is a first post. I’m not quite sure yet if I actually need a blog but I think this is a perfect way to keep me going on this project, one that is quite dear to me and I really want to see finished….but I’m not in a hurry, and I doubt it will ever be really finished. My mind is creative enough (too creative?) to keep adding new stuff for a long time to come….
Anyway, what is the bunker about?

It’s an idea I had since the last century when I started gaming and noticed how most people used wide open spaces to do battle in. For some reason this didn’t, and still doens’t, work for me. I like to see battles in confined spaces, with debris and what not. And to make it really woth my time and effort, it had to be multi-period and multi-scale. Well, time passed, and an idea became a sketch, and then anotyher, and another, but I quickly realised money, my eternal problem, doens’t grow on trees so I would have to make due with cheaper solutions. So no buying of resin dungeons or moulds to cast my own bricks from plaster. Both are too heavy and fragile anyway IMHO.

So we ended up with a lot of notes, a few sketches and a trip to the lumber mill for loads of 6mm MDF. I started 2007 with boxes full of precut bit, and spent quite a few evenings glueing the bits together till I had about 150 pieces. Then April came, that part of the project was shelved and I started making bits and bobs to fill it when someday I would restart my work on it again.

Time flies they say. How right they are.

Johan