Terrain Triumphs and Hobby Musings

It has been an interesting week for me.  I put the Farseer up on Cool Mini Or Not for rating (you can see it and vote on it here, if you’re inclined) and on Instagram and have been humbled by the response.  Sometimes you get a feeling when submitting your work for others to review that it might not get the response that you think it deserves.  That was the case here as the Farseer has a good score but not quite as high as I envisioned.  While that is disappointing I suppose, what I’m actually disappointed is that the pictures I took are not as high of quality as I probably needed them to be to achieve the score I wanted.  Taking great pictures of your miniatures is really key if you want to wow people and get high scores on Cool Mini Or Not.  I’ve taken a few amazing pictures and a lot more that are not up to where they should be.  And truthfully, a lot of that is down to luck and not skill.  In response to my disappointment, I’ve done a lot of research on Youtube and I think I can take better pictures with my phone (which only matters on Instagram) but is still a big victory because I’ve never thought my Instagram pictures looked half as good as they should.  I will keep trying to better myself in this area to become even better at the hobby.

The fun thing this week has been seeing my first three trees get finished.  I ordered some MDF bases from Charlie Foxtrot Models and a week later my order arrived from England.  I was very much impressed by the bases and it saves me the time and hassle of having to cut the bases myself so money well spent in my opinion!  The bases were easy to make as I just followed the basing scheme I’ve been using for minis and terrain on the An Unexpected Journey “board”.  It was nice squeezing in some details like the Kromlech tree stump below.  I hope that these help make the terrain look natural and visually interesting.  They’re fun to paint up as well.

You’ll notice that one tree base does not contain any rocks or tufts.  I figure trees on small bases without tufts will still look good on the board and can be used on other terrain if I ever want to throw a pine tree in.  If I ever change my mind, I can throw some grass on there too.  To test my photography skills, I put together a little action scene with all of my terrain in it and some minis below.  I’m really happy with how this looks and it inspires me to finish up the remaining trees and maybe knock out a couple more hills and I should have a great looking board for a number of Hobbit scenarios.  I was concerned a while back that this board wouldn’t match up with the great expectations that had built up in my head but now I’m not at all worried about that and I think this board is going to look fantastic.

Now if only I could find a faster way to get the trees assembled!  Gluing the foliage seems to be the most time consuming and tedious part of all this.  At least the wood glue I purchased recently seems to work much better than the previous stuff I was using!  Reducing the frustration of having foliage constantly falling off will make a huge difference for me too.  I may be stuck in the trees for a couple of weeks now but I’m going to try and focus them.  Not only am I really close to being able to play Roast Mutton now but I have realized that I’m much closer to being able to play Hobbit scenarios in the coming months than if I dove into Scouring of the Shire projects (or if I tried to split my time between the two).  Don’t be shocked if a few hobbits and ruffians are spotted here on the site though as I have a lot of wargs to paint and will need break from them at times.