I normally try to make a post about once a month to show the latest progress on my projects. However, after the mammoth undertaking that was the battle of Pavia, I have taken a little rest. After that I started a couple of new projects, but as is always the case when you are starting a project, there is not much to show.
So what have I been doing since September last year? Well, I have worked on three projects of varying size.
- The first was for Cold Wars 2026 where the theme was the Wild West. I decided to build a small (for me) project of Tombstone using the What a Cowboy rules. I decided to do a historically accurate representation of the historic gunfight done in the style of the Black and White Westerns.
- The second project is my major multi-year project for Napoleon’s 1813 push for Berlin. The aim is to paint about 7,000 figures in 28mm. This project is not going to be quick.
- For this year’s Historicon I will not be presenting anything new. I will take my 28mm modern Haiti game. However, for Historicon 2027 I want to take a new project. For this project I decided on the early Spanish Civil War in the city of Barcelona.
In this post I will give a very brief overview of each of these three projects. I will present more details of the 1813 project and the Spanish Civil War project in the coming weeks and months.
Tombstone
The key to this project was speed. I wanted to assemble an entire project over Christmas. Empries at War have a range of MDF buildings that accurately represent tombstone and Empress produce a range of figures for the project. I also had my terrain mat builder do me a 2′ x 4′ black and white mat.
I then painted all of the buildings in greyscale as well as assembling cards, rulers, dice and data sheets in black and white. For a two month, low cost project, I think it turned out well. The What a Cowboy rules also worked very well at the convention. As in real life, Doc Holiday struggled to hit anything.
1813 Campaign.
The progress is slow as I am painting 40 figure battalions, and with skirmishers and command bases it is closer to 50 figures per battalion. I am starting with the Prussians under Bulow.
In this post I won’t go into details of which Battalions I have painted, I will leave that for another post. I have painted about ten battalions, some artillery and some command bases. The bases have not been textured yet as I wanted to concentrate on the painting. Here are some photos to show some of the units.
The Spanish Civil War.
I have purchased three books that present black and white photos of the Spanish Civil War, in particular they concentrate on the early war in down town Barcelona. These gave me inspiration for a couple of games concentrating on the street fighting in Barcelona using one of my favorite set of rules Force on Force. The area that I will be concentrating on is La Rambla and Place de Catalunya in the centre of Barcelona. When I started looking for buildings that I could use, nothing gave me the feel of what I wanted. I very quickly came to the conclusion that I would have to scratch build all of the terrain.
The two key buildings for the street fighting were the Telefonica building and the Hotel Colon. I have started constructing the facade of the Hotel Colon. I hope to have the whole building finished in the next month or two.
The first image is a black and white photo of the hotel. I am constructing the entire building along with the banners.
The following image shows the progress so far. The building uses foam core for the base, with pink foam for details along with 3D printed parts and mdf details.
There is a 28mm figure in the main doorway centre for scale.
I still have a lot of work to do on details including the tower and the roof. After that I will concentrate on painting and weathering. It should be quite impressive when it is finished and is teaching me some new scratch building skills.
Conclusion
This post is very brief by design. It is meant to give a flavor of what I am working on. I will go into more detail in future posts.