
This Town Ain’t Big Enough
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About the Project
After seeing a lot of talk about western games, I picked up Dead Man's Hand at salute along with some miniatures along with What a Cowboy. As I don't have any terrain for this I finally decided to start the project with building a town, for this I have some MDF kits from TTCombat's Pitchfork range and some buildings from Renedra.
Related Game: Dead Man's Hand
Related Company: Great Escape Games
Related Genre: Historical
This Project is Active
Finally some miniatures
I’ve finally painted up the first two gangs and I have given them white hats and black hats just so you know who the good and bad guys are. They are painted with mixture of normal and contrast paints with everything getting a coat of strong tone and light brown drybrush.
The wagon is from great escape games and I’ve painted it using the wood kit from Vallejo as old wood, I’ve got 4 more of then to go and they will be a mixture of old and new wood tones.
Layout in Colour
I’ve tried to recreate the earlier shots with the same layout but now with the coloured buildings. I’ve also put a grey stain on all the boardwalk pieces and I may have to carry this over onto the outside stairs on the buildings.
Next up some people for this ghost town, lawmen are nearly ready and I’ve some wagons from great escape games to get painted too.
More Colour
These are all the buildings with some colour, most of that is the wood stain but some is poster paint. In truth I could do with some more colours of wood stain as I didn’t really want two buildings to end up the same colour and I may return to these in the future.
I now have the boardwalks to do, once their done I will try and recreate the town from earlier to see what difference its made and then its time for some miniatures.
Adding some colour
Gerry mentioned there wasn’t a Gerry Can on using wood stain so I decided to do some tests. Above is some test pieces of sprue that had some engraving on them. The left had side had MDF sealer applied to each piece and the right hand side was bare MDF.
The tests were:
Acrylic paint in a tube
GW paint
GW contrast
Village Green wood stain.
All came out ok but the contrast was a bit dark, but I think that was just the colour I choose.
I decided to go with the wood stain, so these building are all coloured using the wood stain apart from the door frame and the Cassidy’s lettering which are just army painter black.
The white needed 2 coats and the red needed 3 but the blue/green and brown were just a single coat.
On the whole I think they came out ok, I didn’t intend to paint every bit just to add some colour to break up the sea of MDF.
MDF built
I’ve finally finished the build of the MDF and set this up on a Deep Cut Studio mat, it’s actually a 6×3 cloth mat but I’ve folded it in half for the town for now.
The initial setup didn’t contain all the building but after swapping a few around I was able to get pictures of all of them. I am quite liking the boardwalks as they lift up the building and give it an old west feel, so I might get a couple more of those.
I was looking at looking into painting them with coloured wood stain, I wanted something that would let the engraved detail come through but be quick and easy. I will need to test it first as I dont know how MDF reacts to that unless there is Gerry can somewhere on that.
Wall Joints
@guillotine asked but the tabs showing though, a lot of the wall joints overlap to give the illusion of end of logs sticking out.
Building the town
The first couple of kits are built, on the whole not too bad but there are no part numbers or even references to which sheet they are on so you need to be careful as there places where several pieces are similar and its quite easy to put them in the wrong place.
Painting them will have to wait for now but I will get around to in at some point.
In the beginning
These are kits from TTCombat, I’ve made sure I have bank for people to rob, and a saloon for people to fight in and Sheriff’s office for lock people up/break people out of. The rest are random shops/building to make up what I hope to be a nice town.