Greetings!
For a while now I've wanted to be able to put hobby-related stuff up on the web faster and more regularly than it is able to appear on the Hollywood Brigadiers website maintained by the small group of historical miniature wargamers to which I belong here in Los Angeles. I love "HollywoodBrigadiers" -- but I need to get my fix of posting pics, be they battle pics, painting pics, scratch-building pics or terrain pics faster.
So, I've decided to give this "blogging" thing a shot. Mostly it will just be a place for me to post pictures and perhaps some accompanying text. And mostly the stuff will fall into the broad categories mentioned above:
(1) BATTLE PICS: pretty self-explanatory -- pictures of battles fought in my garage (it's a 2-car, with a 9'x5' pingpong table, so they will be decent sized)
(2) PAINTING PICS: I don't paint many figures anymore but I do paint a lot of terrain and scenics (model buildings), mostly castle parts but also various other stuff. I usually take tons of step-by-step pictures with my iPhone throughout the process, which will probably provide a large part of the content of this blog.
(3) SCRATCH-BUILDING PICS: again, like my painting these days, this is mostly terrain and model building related, though occasionally, like with my carroccios (medieval Italian church wagons which served as mobile command posts), they will cover some sort of miniature figures.
(4) TERRAIN PICS: here's the thing: I LOVE TERRAIN. I really do love it. I L-O-V-E -- LOVE -- MINIATURE TERRAIN. To be honest,
I don't really know exactly why, but I do, and that's what matters -- at least to me. I buy it finished and unfinished, I struggle to create it, successfully and unsuccessfully. For a while now I've wanted to build some heavy-duty terrain boards for use in my garage but I still haven't bitten the bullet and started that project for real. At the same time, I refuse to play miniature wargames on tables covered with felt or masking tape or stacks of blocks or books or similar. Nothing against anyone that enjoys playing that way but I need a little bit more, which leaves me in a kind of middle-ground/no man's land of terrain, where I don't really have "model railroad"/"museum diorama" level stuff by a longshot but I do have just enough to satisfy my terrain-junky jones. The point of all this terrain talk is that I think I'll be posting pics of some terrain set-ups on the old pingpong table, sometimes even when a real world miniature battle is not being fought across it. In the past I've only taken pictures and posted pictures of actual games in progress, rather than "staging" pics for the pure and simple joy of it. But I think that is about to change...
In general I play in only 2 historical periods:
(1) 14th-15th Century Medievals - including Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses, Swiss Wars, wars of the Italian city-states & their Condottiere, etc.
(2) Northwest Frontier/Second Afghan War British colonials - small, medium and large battles involving Pathan tribesmen, Ghazi fanatics and, occasionally, Afghan regulars, vs. British and Indian Army forces.
I know it's a severely limited palette. Truth is I'm a pretty obsessive/compulsive guy. I don't have much time to devote to the hobby, if I had more I might branch out and spread my wings to a whole plethora of periods but for the time being I'm stuck in the 14th-15th and 19th Centuries. I do however have decent smaller size armies for the French & Indian War and a lot of old school Airfix and Atlantic 20mm plastic WWII British airborne and German ground forces (dating back to my long ago childhood), plus my fellow "Hollywood Brigadiers" gamers have various ancient and Napoleonic armies, so it's not impossible that any or all of those may find their way onto the garage pingpong table one of these days, or nights.
WHOOPS!!! Almost forgot: I game entirely in 25mm-28mm. Not prejudiced against any other scale but played entirely in 15mm as a child and really enjoy the artistry of the larger -- classic miniature wargaming -- scale.
