Postcards from Miltonburg

Over on Karl's Facebook page I've been running a series of 'Postcards from Miltonburg'. I've included one or two on this blog from time to time to give some colour to recent posts. But it's not an easy thing to achieve living in a suburb of London, to generate a series of photos that would fit a theme of Ye Olde Worlde. You have to avoid modern housing and constructions, people clothed anachronistically for the period you want to represent, buses and cars thundering past, in fact anything that breaks the spell.

This really leaves me with very few options locally, just the local park, hopefully when there are not too many people about and a few holiday photos that reside in the collection that can be adopted and manipulated.

Parsloe's Park has become the edge of the woods around Miltonburg, photographed from very tight angles to avoid parts of the Becontree Estate in the distance popping up through the trees. Photos in the collection come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on how much I've had to crop. A visit to Cornwall gave me images of Bodmin Moor and Tintagel which have found their way into the collection along with The Bishop’s Palace in Lincoln.

That's all well and good, but not only is this world from the books Olde Worlde, it's also somewhere else in the universe, with a different sun, planets and moons in the sky and hence different light.

So now we need the additional tweaks - I need to adjust the brightness, contrast, colour depth and tone of the picture. A few years back that would have been quite a task. Getting the photos printed and then scanned and the amount of processing effort to get them adjusted based on what you had to work with in the first place would have been incredible. The photo editing tools were out there, but I find I could spend hours in front of the pc struggling with these tools not really knowing what was going on and not having the time to work through and comprehend some of the tutorials.

Now we have these mobile phones devices which do just about everything except make the morning coffee. (I’m not much of tea drinker.) They have apps, which are quite simple and quite powerful for image manipulation that would have taken some computers from my youth ages to achieve and process. There are quite a few of these apps out there but I’ve found PEStudio (Photo Effect Studio) does just about everything I need from cropping, re-colouring,  light manipulation plus the odd special effect thrown in for good measure. However I cannot find it the App Store any longer to tell you who made it, and there are no credits on the app that I can find. However I’m sure there are many others that can provide the same. And what’s more the image is transformed into a whole other world within a matter of minutes allowing me to post it direct to the page in question. So different from how things used to be.

Dungeon in Bishop’s Palace (Lincoln) becomes the Dungeon in Esmay

The Hurlers in the distance on Bodmin Moor (Cornwall) becomes Karl’s long walk home

Parsloes Park (Dagenham) with some cropping becomes secret way to Gerranthaul’s

View from Tintagel Castle (Cornwall) becomes a coastal climb for Karl & Spiker

Own model stone circle becomes gifted with special Solstice light

Karl's adventures are available in paperback and on the Kindle from Amazon.

Castle Ruins - Part Two

In the second part of my blog on building the castle ruins I’ll talk through the technique I used to get from a piece of polystyrene packaging to a castle ruin. In later blogs I’ll show specific pieces from this collection and talk about the different features of each piece.

The materials used are very basic, a piece of polystyrene packaging, some ready mix wall filler and acrylic paint. (Both the ready mixed wall filler and the acrylic paint were both bought from the local ‘pound store’ or equivalent shop.) Making this a very cheap construction.

When I first get a piece of packaging I twist and turn it in all directions, looking for interesting angles and shapes. Unless you’ve bulk purchased a large number of the same item every piece is going to be different. You’re looking for interesting corner pieces, angles and shapes. Sometimes the best shapes are not always the most obvious.

Once you’ve decided where you want to make your cuts you can either:-

• Use a very sharp knife (depending on how thick the packaging is),

• Break it by hand – this creates a better roughed up edge more like the final effect you’re trying to create but can create a lot more mess especially with some types of packaging,

• Use a hot wire cutter – makes for cleanest cuts, maybe a bit too clinical in some cases – and should be done in a ventilated room.

I use a hot wire cutter bought from the local hobby shop made by Woodland Scenics when I want specific cuts, but I have used all three methods during this build.

Once I’ve cut my shapes out, broken a few edges or with a drop of PVA glue put a couple of pieces together and allowed to dry I’m ready to start covering with the ready mix wall filler. You can use the self made up filler just as well provided you get the mix correct – follow on packet instructions carefully - I just find the ready mixed stuff more convenient, especially when I don’t have a lot of time going spare to work on my modelling.

If you already have a tub of ready mix to hand and you’ve found it’s gone hard – don’t throw it out, wait for my next blog.

New ready mix freshly opened will spread over the polystyrene easily without any effort, you should spread it over about  2 or 3 millimetres thick. You’ll get the feel for what is right as you work. If the mix is a little dry and does not spread so smoothly you can coat the polystyrene with a very thin layer of PVA glue first, when this goes tacky then spread the wall filler on. Do not use too much glue as this will result in a gooey mess and the wall filler will then slide off and could take hours to be useable.

For stone work smooth off the wall, sometimes I find patting it down with my thumb the easiest method – always wash your hands after. Leave the wall filler to set for a few minutes, again this will vary depending on room temperature and age and make of the ready mix you’re using. You’re looking for a fine skin to form before it goes hard.

Taking a small .5 to 1cm modelling chisel or even a plastic coffee stirrer (that’s actually what I used) you poke into the ready mix covering. For stone blocks use about the width of the chisel or stirrer blade as a guide, poking both horizontally and vertically with your cutting tool. Stagger the blocks like brick work. For the stacked rock effect that is more like the Tintagel ruins in my last blog just make very close repeated stabs into the filler, so that it puckers up into smaller thinner bulges. In this wall I’ve used the block style at the base and the stab random pattern further up. Work on one side at a time and allow to fully dry before working on the other, otherwise thumb prints will replace brick work. When using the block style always make sure you follow your pattern round the corner when working on your second side or edge otherwise the stone block won’t look correct.

Once the whole piece is covered and dry you can then paint.

First I under coated in slightly watered down black acrylic paint, the watered down paint allowed it to better get into the grooves. Beware; holding any painted piece before the paint is dry will result on you lifting the paint off on your fingers. Like the wall filler, work around the model in sections allowing half to dry before doing the second part. In some cases small white flecking may come through – you can either touch these up with black paint and allow to dry before colouring or just paint over when you colour the wall.

When the base coat is dry you can paint over the wall with either a black/white mix or blend and dry brush the wall with the neat white acrylic paint, smearing it over the wall to give a lighter grey rock effect. Obviously don’t use your best brushes for any of this work.

That was basically it how I created the majority of these pieces, some have distinguishing features which I’ll talk about next time. Please feel free to leave any comments or questions and I’ll try to answer them next time.

Happy ruins!

Castle Ruins - Part One

Along with the coffee stick Ghost Town which I’m working on, I have also got several large pieces of castle ruins scattered around the house. 

These have come about as a result of another project, one for the GM of our current campaign – so I’m not going to give the game away by talking about that at the moment – but watch this space.

Part of that build included some ruins, but I’ve taken the build on a lot further, inspired by a couple of trips made last year.

Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. June 2010

Last year I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to visit Tintagel Castle in Cornwall and The Bishop's Palace in Lincoln. Some parts of the Bishop's Palace have been preserved better as actual structures, other parts are ruins.



Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. June 2010



Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. June 2010



Both are owned and run by English Heritage. Walking around these structures felt quite incredible - these old constructions had been witness to so much history and legend. These are perfect places to go just for the atmosphere and inspiration you can gain from them.



Bishop’s Palace, Lincoln Sept 2010

Bishop’s Palace, Lincoln Sept 2010

These are a few of the photos I took at these places. I decided to build some game table pieces inspired by these photos – not to copy them but to get pieces that reflect the style of these old historic landmarks. I’ve kept them for the moment without bases or any grass or other foliage so that any of these pieces could be used in our current campaign – which is a world with little greenery in it. (For more details on the world in question flick over to Big Lee’s Miniature Adventures.) Very much a world underground.

All of the pieces you’ll see in this project have been made in the same way. They are all pieces of polystyrene packaging cut up, covered in cheap ready mix wall filler and painted with just black and white acrylic paint. Getting the polystyrene from friends and family when they get deliveries makes this a very cheap project to fund, and quite often you’ll find they will be only be too glad for someone else to take their rubbish away for them.

The first two pieces I made were from packaging that came with my brother’s washing machine. One of them had two perfect round circular holes already cut into it. The moment I looked at this piece I was reminded of the wells I saw in the grounds of the Bishop’s Palace.

I also had a flash back to the 1980’s TV series ‘Robin of Sherwood’ where often our heroes ended up thrown into a dungeon via a pit. These holes would be very useful in the final piece.

Quite a number of these pieces have a small tale to tell of their own, over the next couple of blogs I'll be talking about these pieces and their unique features.