Bull Run Order of battle Beta

Here's a look on what I've done with the Orders of battle until now: Bull Run oob PDF

The document is meant to be printed on A3 in which case the unit labels should print out 25mm wide so that I can just cut them out and attach to units. The OOB itself is, at the moment, pretty much just the result of scaling from the 150 scenario in the Eastern Battles scenario book to 200-scale. That means I've dropped 25% of the stands.

You'll notice that there are a lot of artillery stands. The rules of Fire and Fury suggest that the actual frontage of a battery should be wider, but has been kept narrow for visual impact on 15mm miniatures. The rules state that several batteries aligned in a line should have an inch wide gap between them to keep it realistic. So, since I'm doing 6mm, I should have no trouble using 2 stands of artillery to represent a battery, especially since there is a possibility of a battery to be "damaged" and to fight at half strength.

The OOB might see some minor changes, but I doubt that I will be adding much more stands to it as I have quite a bit to paint as it is. I ordered the last batch of miniatures I need from Baccus, the last batch of stands I need from Litko and a metric ton of small scale model trees from China.

Rebasing in progress

Nothing too delicious to show you so I've been quiet, but not idle! The laser cut wooden bases and their magnetic bottoms arrived from Litko Aerosystems and I've been hard at work rebasing my old 60mm*30mm bases to 25mm*19mm. I really like how they're shaping out. The bases themselves are great. Thin, cut to perfection and no warping at all when I glue the figures and the sand on. I really recommend these and I'll be ordering a new batch myself.

I also like the look on the miniatures now that they're on the new stands. Somehow they look more like a mass of troops even though the number of fires per stand is less. I'll post some pictures once I've finished the bases on my old models. In the same time, I have already painted some fresh ones. High time, too, two months of time left!

Terrainwise, I've found a cheap supplier of trees I ordered from, the package should arrive in a month or so. I'm working on some of the basic terrain features and they're shaping up like I hope. I just have some problems on how I'll do the rivers and roads so that they look good and don't take too much effort. Any hints would be appreciated.

Well, better get back to work. I've had some union troops in shallow water waiting to be released from their old basing!

I have a new camera!

Ok, so I finally bought a new camera to replace the one that broke down in Cuba last year. It's a Canon PowerShot SX 210 IS and after a day of toying with it it seems to be worth the money. I've never really gone through the trouble of finding out how to get good photos of miniatures before so now I'm reading tutorials in the net and talking to fellow wargamers on things like lighting, white balance, aperture factors, ISO values and so on. I've started out a bit clueless but I'm getting there. Here's a sample on what I've managed to snap so far:

The figures are based 6cm * 3cm  which is popular with Baccus miniatures. The blue highlight looks excessive but I think without it the figures look too dark when viewed from afar.

This one I was quite happy with:

Practice, practice!