I started writing this blog entry on Sunday, December 7th — Pearl Harbor Day 2014 — the 73rd anniversary of that momentous historical event — but unfortunately, right after that, I got sick. Â Everyone gets sick from time to time, myself included, but this was bad — the sickest I’ve been in a couple of decades, and it removed me from any hobby-related activity for the past couple of weeks.
The good news is, I got better! Â Well… I’m not really 100% better yet, but I’m MUCH, MUCH BETTER than I was, thank goodness. Â In my experience the only good that comes from being seriously ill or seriously injured, if you are able to recover, is it reminds you not to take incredibly valuable things like your otherwise good health for granted, the way many of us — and certainly I myself — generally do. Â So right now I am very grateful to be just a little bit sick and on the road, hopefully, to a complete recovery.
One thing my improvement has made possible is me finishing up the painting of the Kabul River itself on my Kabul River terrain-board. Â This step was postponed when I got sick. Â Prior to that I had glued down ballast and pebbles over the ground-cover on both sides of the river, had added a coat of “Scenic Cement” (watered-down White Glue/PVA), painted the ground-cover, painted the rocks, and also painted over the river itself in light gray in order to very clearly mark off the area to be colored in as “water”.
Next up will be doing some color tests with the Enviro Tex Lite 2-part clear resin, adding tints from a few different Acrylic Inks I bought a while ago for that purpose. Â I had hoped to make some progress on that front over the Christmas/New Year Holiday, but my illness has probably made that impossible. Â Still, I’m happy I was able to finish painting the river before the Holiday Break has ended.
Here’s my usual ton-and-a-half of WIP pics showing the completion — up to the pouring of the resin — of the Kabul River board…
Once again another cracking effort. I'm insanely jealous of your table sir. Where do you store all these boards after you've made them?!?
Ethan, another awesome WIP with a ton and a half of cool pics! I'm glad you are feeling better and sorry to hear about your serious recent illness, hears to a speedy and complete recovery.
Your terrain boards are looking amazing. The finished project is going to be Epic.
Happy Chanukah brother.
JB
Thank you very much, Michael Mills & Sgt. Guiness!
@Michael: I take your jealousy as a great compliment, and thank you for it! Re: the storage issue… well, that, my friend, is an EXCELLENT QUESTION! Truth is those boards spend most of their time stored on my tabletop. At my wife's insistance, before we held the party for my middle child's Bat Mitzvah at our house, I put a pair of very high up (so high I need a serious ladder to reach them) shelves in our garage, where I stored the original 6 “Maiwand Day” boards in 2 triple stacks, with padding between them for protection, so my home-office would not be filled with wargaming terrain boards during the occasion. I am also able to put them up atop my bookshelves, though there's really only room for 4 of them unless I double-stack. Truth is I need to clean out our garage to make room to store them and perhaps even move my ping-pong/wargame table, so my home-office can look like more of an office and less of a war-room — though in my defense I get a lot of work done in there no matter what it looks like!
@Jeff: I'm glad to say I am even better than I was when I wrote the above post, still not 100%, but getting there. Thanks for the Happy Chanukah wishes — it's funny how many dang ways there are to spell that holiday name in English!
With all due modesty, I kind of agree with you about the project being Epic! I stopped by my friend's shop and got the carpentry done for another terrain-board — a simple 6'x2' plain ground-cover board, so I don't need to use one of the Maiwand boards with a nullah carved into it. Besides the resin for the rivers, all that's left is the 4'x2' swamp board I now plan to build for the South-East corner of the table, plus making a bunch more crop-fields and road pieces. Meanwhile I hope to start doing some play-testing very soon on the lay-out as it is now.
I have to agree epic is the only fitting description !!
The pic with the Hussars really shows this off at its best.
Glad to hear your on the mend!!!
Best wishes
Willie