Keep Your Powder Dry

 As much as I enjoy painting and modelling I am always on the lookout for stuff that makes life easier, or saves time. I have often wondered if there was something that could help me speed up the laborious process of putting on my underbase markings. (See here for an explanation). An idea germinated, and in the finest tradition of Blackadder's faithful sidekick, Baldrick, I had a cunning plan... The finished jig. In the picture it looks like the top layer overhangs the base - it doesn't: that's just the angle the picture was taken at coupled with a bit of shadow Every so often I clean the paint and glue from my cutting mat, which gives a lovely clean surface on which to work. The downside is that the 1cm squares are wearing off, to the extent that they are now pretty much none existent. I used to use these squares to help me accurately position masking tape on the underside of my bases (enabling me to get a nice crisp line for my allegiance colour code). Even when the squar...

A bonus post. Crivens! On a Thursday too! In my quest for the easy-life, I have come across a number of bits of stuff, that, well, just make everything easier. Regular readers (hello both of you) will be aware of my almost evangelical zeal for the joy of blu-tack. Those of you who are new a quick precis: blu-tack is a really good way of holding figures/sticking them to the cutting mat when doing stuff that will almost certainly result in loss of blood when you get it wrong. Drilling out hands, drilling heads, major conversions that involve sharp stabby, pointy things basically. For an example see here . Tongue depressors/waxing sticks are cheaply and easily available on fleabay, and make the painting of large numbers of figures a lot easier to manage, less messy, and a heck of a lot quicker. But what of those figures that are really awkward, or need extra bling?  Enter the painting handle. There are some really fancy wooden ones, with celtic designs etched on to them. Blingtastic, ...

The devil is in the detail or so they say. I must have been very bored one day whilst on the old interwebs, or I am the son of Satan. I'd say the former... some may disagree. I managed to pick up a couple of brown leather money pouches from a LARPs seller on fleabay. They weren't expensive and are really well made (they smell wonderful too); they make excellent, atmospheric dice bags. Needless to say, the Parliamentarian  player has orange dice, the Royalist player red. I also picked up orange and red arc of fire templates from Warbases, to complete the theme. Rather than having ugly tape measures I plumped for brass and aluminium measuring sticks from Products for Wargamers . Extravagant but lovely. Red and orange felt folding dice trays from  All Rolled Up  complete my gaming aid sets. If you aren't familiar with All Rolled Up's dice trays, they have a black faux leather outer and a felt inner. A clever combination of poppers allows it to fold flat when n...

We all know where a general keeps his armies*, but where do you keep yours? My 6mm Heroics and Ros ECW armies lived in a Cadbury's chocolate fingers tin. Handy, but useless. Probably explains why the pikes looked like over cooked spaghetti. As my 15mm Napoleonics armies grew to silly numbers, storage became an issue. At the time Sally 4th came up with their  Warchests  boxes and lids. Warchests are laser cut MDF boxes which come in kit form. You'll need PVA glue and some elastic bands to assemble them. Easy to assemble, but for some reason I find the 52mm boxes the most tricky, often falling apart during that awkward act of putting the elastic bands on (to hold them together whilst the glue sets). They now come in a number of variations (clear panel, pre-coloured, different sizes, magnetic bases etc). Mine are the basic ones: I use 35mm height boxes for casualty markers and foot figures; 52mm for cavalry, dragoons and artillery; and 70mm for foot regiments that...