What's on your table right now?

[Bison]

UNO is an underappreciated game of cut throats and villainy!  Or it could be that the gaming flavor of the week at the Bison Ranch is gang up on dad.   ;D

[Bison]

Ticket to Ride X 3 today.  The oldest loves this game.  I think she asked me to played it 10 times today before noon.  I gave in and played 2 games and 1 more time before dinner with 4 players. 

[BanzaiCat]

I have my 'big' package of Xwing Minis stuff coming today. Wish I hadn't bought some of it, though some of it is an early b-day present that I didn't purchase myself. Still, looking forward to it once it finally gets here...a minor bright spot in an otherwise crappy week and a half.

[LongBlade]

OK, back in the middle of June i picked up a simple waterline model of the Kursk. Finally got around to priming and painting it over the last week. Then I had to decide what to do with it. It's rather simple so I figured it needed a kind of simple diorama to display it. Clearly, being a sub shown at the waterline, it needs to be in the water. It measures about eight inches long, so I figured a display piece about 12" x 4" would be about perfect.

Ideally I wanted to have a mirror to give the water some depth. But after querying online for a bit I didn't find any low hanging fruit with those dimensions. Last night i went to Michael's and looked around. They did have a framed mirror about that size, but it had a kind of bottle shape that didn't really do what I wanted.

So I poked around a bit more there and found they had some wood pieces sold through Revell which are exactly what I need for this little project.

Now, it's press board, not solid wood. So I was faced with some design decisions for the quarter inch high sides. Should I make them water, too? Should I paint them? Should I stain them? I decided to go with a stain. It may not be great, but worst case I can sand it off and do something else.

The next decision point was a chicken-or-egg type of one. I want the top to be highly reflective. A while back I stumbled across some chrome spray paint. You don't see that often, so I bought it. But should I paint the top (chrome) first or stain the sides? Ultimately I decided to prime and paint the top. If any paint bleeds over, I can sand it and then stain.

So first I taped the sides and then laid some primer down.





More images to follow after the paint dries.

[LongBlade]

Next I painted some ripples to add dimension under the water effects I'm about to paint over it.

[LongBlade]

By the collective silence on my sub project I fear the worst - no one is following my mad genius' vision.

Ah, well. It's not the first time.

OK, so last night I applied some water effects. And yet another challenge arose - it looks like my jar of water effects may be old. It was a consistency closer to jello than...ummm...peanut butter? It's normally not terribly viscous, but this stuff is worse than normal.

I apply it anyway to see if I can get away with it.



Normally water effects dry overnight but I'm thinking this will take longer.

Sure enough, checking it about twelve hours later and it's only begun to partially dry. However, you can see in places where the transparency is starting to come through. Hopefully my base of reflective chrome followed by some water striations was the right move. We'll see.

[panzerde]

I'm interested to see how this turns out. The water effects stuff is starting to look interesting!

[bob48]

^ Same here.

[LongBlade]

Thanks. It *should* turn completely transparent. It also shrinks a good deal, so when you apply it, you can apply it liberally. I normally wouldn't have put quite as much on, but due to its lack of viscosity I didn't have too much choice. Either it was the paint that it couldn't adhere to and/or the age kept it from glopping on. And it would only go on in great big chunks. Kinda tough to deal with.

Hopefully it's not too old. In any case this is probably the last project I'll do with that jar. Definitely time to buy another.

[LongBlade]

In order to expedite the drying process I took it outside and put it on the lid of my grill. We've got temps in the mid-80's and reasonably low humidity so I figured it would dry a bit quicker than inside.

Here it is after I put it on the grill.



And here it is after I rotated it and it had a few hours to soak up some sun.



As noted above the water effects tend to shrink a bit. Some has started to pull up from the edge of the wood block and there is a little bit of exposed chrome where some spots have pulled away from the sub. That can be touched up.

One of the things I've noted is that where it is shallow enough to see the block you can make out the wood grain. Fortunately it's not too bad. Also, I'm thinking that the paint I laid down to mimic how the sun breaks up in the water wasn't nearly fine enough. Not sure I really did any favors. It should probably be much finer lines and far, far more of them.

All-in-all it looks more like a learning experience than brilliant piece of design, though I suppose to lay folk it will pass muster. I think to finalize it I'll have to get some foam water effects to get a white cap effect on the tips of many of those waves. And I can always fill in some of the shallow gaps.

So I guess I'm not completely done, but I'm not *really* satisfied with it though there is room to salvage.

[LongBlade]

If you guys want to see the full sized image it can be found at the following link. Just download the 4.9 MB file and zoom to your heart's content: http://i1081.photobucket.com/albums/j349/longblade/GrogHeads/20150803_173157_zpsm7f9d2bz.jpg

[GJK]

Is that the full sized replica that you're building underneath?  :) 

Looking good LB, I wish that I could do that stuff with models- I'd build my own terrain for my miniatures.

Sharing mine if that's ok.  I just got back from the printer today my version of the map for John Prados' Third Reich.  I drew this in 2008 and AP used it over their own map that came with the game, for the VASSAL module.  I saw on facebook someone had printed this map out.  I asked him about it and he printed it from the VASSAL module.  Since I have the original photoshop file, I thought that I'd print out a high quality version of the map and give the game a run this weekend.  I've never even punched out the counters for this game but am excitedly reading the rules now.  My map:

[LongBlade]

Nice, GJK.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I tried out Eclipse at the nerd store.  Very fun game with some of the ugliest colour schemes I've ever seen.  Felt like I was trapped in a kitchen showroom in 1974.

[GJK]

Well hopefully mine looks like it was from the 80's at the least.