The Vikings are coming!!

OK these guys are actually Saxon Thegns from the Viking era. Anyways, here's a couple shots of the first painted miniatures. The figures are 28mm, making the shields only 1/2 an inch across.

If you want to see the components before they were built you can view the box set on the Battlegound Hobbies blog.



There are additional images of these first four painted Saxons on the Battleground Hobbies blog.

Enjoy!

The Christmas Miracle!

We learned of this beautiful Christmas Miracle and wanted to share it with everyone!

There was a gingerbread man, well actually just a gingerbread head. You see, there wasn't enough dough to finish him. This made him very sad.
He lay there on the cookie plate thinking no one would want him, being just a head and all. Then out the window he saw a Christmas Star! Well he wished upon that Christmas star to be a real gingerbread man.

Suddenly "POP" he had a body!! This was amazing thought the gingerbread head! He kept wishing and..

"POP" he had an arm!! What an astounding event!! So he kept wishing...

"POP" he had another arm!! Wow, it was amazing, he kept wishing...

"POP" again and he had a leg!! Could this really be happening? Could he hope beyond all hope!! He wished harder and harder...

 "POP" he had another leg!! What a Christmas miracle!! He was ecstatic!!

What a glorious event, he wished he could share it with everyone and then suddenly...







he began shaking and ..

"POP!!" he exploded!!!















Yes friends I'm sorry to say, it was over for the gingerbread man.




And the moral of our story...






You figured it out right?






Quit while you're a head.


Merry Christmas!
Enjoy!

Finalized Warhammer 40K Dreadnought and forthcoming projects

Well it was a busy day with quite a few projects being started. All in all a great deal was accomplished. here's some work in progress shots as well as a few finished pieces. We'll post completed images when they get finished!

We started off getting a squad of ork boyz assembled and primed. They really are primed, just not in this image ;] 

The nob, or squad leader, received a barrel extension and in orky fashion, a crude bayonet.

A  squad of ork lootas and burna boyz was also assembled and primed.

And last but not least, we created a great city fight base for Josh's dreadnought. The details on how we did this are posted on the Battleground Hobbies Blog.

 Here's a few more images of this beauty.

Enjoy!

Hobbits beware! Stone Trolls are here!

Howdy folks, its been a while since our last post, so here’s a “little” something to satisfy that need. A couple 28mm Stone Trolls from Games Workshop for the Warhammer fantasy battles game. Games Workshop also makes some great trolls for the Lord of The Rings table top miniatures game too.

These two guys were painted as a step by step “how to” for the Battleground Hobbies blog. You can see how they were done by visiting the link above.

Enjoy!

49 Chevy Gasser!!

Hollywood has been burning the midnight gas under a full moon on this one!! 

He was working in his hot rod lab late one night when his eyes beheld an awesome sight. A genuine1949 Chevy that has Anger Management written all over it. No, it really does! Check out these images for yourself!!

Just remember folks, Hollywood's motto is "A steady brush for shaky people". Well at least for today.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

The Old Crow

One of the young guns here at Henderson Works recently accepted a commission to design a logo for a new blog. Battleground Hobbies is just getting started and will be a full fledged online retailer. They hope to open a retail store in the greater Pittsburgh region in the near future.


Their blogs tag line is "The Old Crow" and they will have articles related to the hobby gaming that you've seen on some of our posts here on our blog. They asked for a battle hardened old bird to show he's been through a scrap or two with who knows what type of opponent. Here he is in all his hard earned glory and you can visit him live at Battleground Hobbies, The Old Crow.


Enjoy!

World War II Photography made easy!

My daughter went to a World War II DDay reenactment in Ohio a couple weeks ago. A friend she traveled with took this great shot of a mutual friend who was in one of the groups stationed there. She thought it would look impressive if it was "old fashioned" like photos from the war. Well we can't go back and do it so we use Photoshop! With that said, Photoshop is a powerful tool and there are many ways to "age" an image, this is one way.

The original photo was taken with a Canon Power Shot SX30 IS at 4320 X 3240 pixels. It took some other wonderful shots that day!


First thing we did was change the image to grayscale, adjusted the levels to get more contrast and added texture by using the noise filter. Using Gaussian distribution and checking Monochromatic worked the best.

We created a new layer and selected a nice brown for our sepia tone. Then used "select all" and filled the layer with the sepia color we chose. we changed the layer attribute from normal to "Color" and adjusted the opacity to 82 percent.

Next I found some historical information about England and airfields near South Hampton dock where a lad his age might have been stationed a couple days before DDay. I hand wrote the text on paper and scanned it in. Once added into our image on its own layer I changed the layer attribute from normal to "Darken". This effectively removed the background.

Images from that time weren't typically borderless so I set guidelines approximately a quarter inch from the edges and used the rectangular select tool to draw a box. I then inverted the selection to get the outer edges selected. I filled the layer with white and had my border. This layer was currently above the sepia layer.

This is the fun step. Here you see the scratches layer I used. It needs to obviously fill the entire area so scale it if you need to. Set the layer attribute from normal to "Hard Light" and adjust the opacity to your liking. We set our opacity to 70 percent

This gave us the final look! we moved the frame layer behind the sepia and scratches layer so it had the same faded and yellowed feel as the rest of the image.








As I mentioned, this is one of the many ways to achieve the desired effect. There are many others and I encourage you to experiment and find what you like!


Enjoy!