John Brown's Painted Axis and Allies Pieces

@brpiusosb

We order from GBS enterprises. They have mattress protectors in all sizes., and they are water proof.

Any good mattress protectors should be water proof, and I’m sure there are other companies that sell them.

We quit using mattress pads, because it takes the feel away from a new mattress, because of the padding in them.

@cavestone I also use vallejo paints. The key question here is are you brush painting, or using an airbrush, or both?

The Vallejo paints have a “Model Air” line that comes pre-thinned. You can buy a thinning product (from them) to add to the “Model Color” series paints, which are the exact same thing, just more concentrated and thicker.

If you’ve never used an airbrush, its a bit finicky–it requires regular cleaning and a without a good brush and compressor the paint will flow very inconsistently. The process will be very frustrating unless you use the pre-thinned paints because the brush can only blow paint that is within a certain set of thickness parameters that are difficult to achieve, especially if you are trying to mix the air in the brush’s reserve or in small quantities. That’s why having copies of both Model Air and Model Color is fine by me–unlike Warhammer 40K I’m using primarily earthy colors, greens, dunkelgelb and dunkelgrau… other AFV and camoflage colors and so i don’t need a collection of primary or bright colors.

But I recommend it. The airbrush creates a sublime, beautiful layer and slight mix variations can be used to create shadows, grades, etc. Then you go back over with your brush, adding highlights, lines, details. Then, back over again with a drybrushing…then back to the airbrush to blast Flory Wash all over it.

Can’t see your photos, you can’t post photos until you have a certain post count. I wouldn’t use water to thin paints, they are water soluble but the mix and viscosity is all wrong (though water is obv. cheap and easy to clean up)

As for oil-based paints, these require thinner to clean up, they are much more difficult to drybrush with and are not used for airbrushing. The days of the old testors paints is long behind us–even apple barrel paints are easier to work with and cheaper. The early painting methods were much more about glomming thick layers of paint onto lead miniatures and the modern approach with water based paint and a series of different techniques creates much better results.

I’m using Adobe Photoshop CS6.  The textures that I made for the neutrals are partially “from scratch” and partially “stitched together” (and color corrected) from other areas of the map.

@CWO:

@Drfrozenfire:

I’m going to probably print a large transparency map based on the board I’ve been designing based on satellite imagery that is in some serious high definition.

If you’ll be using satellite imagery as the basis for your map, will you be keeping the real-world proportions of the land masses and oceans?  The Global 1940 game map, for practical game play purposes, distorts both the size and the shape of various geographic areas.

No, I’ve taken the satellite images and enlarged certain areas so that there is room in places like Europe for the large scale of battle that often takes place there. When I’m done with the map file, I’ll post it here if you’re interested

Nice work , lots of detail

I’m not aware of such a blank outline map existing.  Your best option might be to cover the game map with several taped-together sheets of clear acetate (the kind used for purposes like overheard projection) and trace the borders with a felt pen to produce a blank outline.  You’d then have various options for transfering this outline to the wood surface.  A low-tech method would be to cover the wood surface with sheets of carbon paper (if you can still find any, since it’s gone out of style), place your acetate outline over the carbon paper, then trace over the borders with a hard pencil.  Alternately, you could scan or digitally photograph your acetate outline and use that as the printing file you mentioned.

I can see wizards of the coast having a blanket statement rejecting all requests to modify material, after all… they probaly deal with it alot with their D&D department than with Avilon Hill products.

Those tanks are some of the best AA pieces I’ve ever seen! I really like the extra details added and especially like the matt finish.