Phil's New Website

Sorry I've been a bit quiet - I've had a lot on my plate lately, what with coping with ageing parents, looking after the kids over their half-term holiday, and stuff like that.  I haven't done much painting.  Today though, the missus is off work, and my son has gone to a mate's so I've been able to relax and start to get on again.  My wife, daughter and I spent most of this morning on a trawl around markets and the likes, looking for felt, or cloth, suitable to make a 'terrain cloth' for 'Fire in the East'.  I'd really like to use terrain boards, but I don't have the space to store them (it's an 'either or' situation - figures or terrain!), so a cloth is the only sensible option.  There are more material shops and market stalls than I'd have thought possible for a town this size - half the women living here must do nothing but sew just to keep them all in business!  

We got some odd looks, I can tell you - me with a movement tray and two pots of paint, and us all poring over all sorts of bits of cloth.  We fairly speedily came to the conclusion that it had to be fairly plain, but that colour was more important than texture.  I've come home with a small scrap of material to try out.  

It's actually the 'back' of some 'corduroy' fabric.  The colour match is good (the best we saw, by a very long way).  There is quite a bit of texture or pattern to it - but not so that you really notice, other than fairly close-up (as in the photo above).  It's reasonably cheap - a bit big enough for what I have in mind (8' x 5' - or 2.4 m x 1.5 m for those of a metric persuasion) will only cost about a tenner.  It came home screwed up in the pocket of my fleece,  so creasing doesn't appear to be a problem.  It's heavy enough that it'll probably 'stay put' on the table pretty well.  With some blobs of flock glued to it, I think it looks fairly decent - what do you reckon?  

As I said in my last entry, Keith from Aventine Miniatures very kindly sent me a few of their new Republican Roman velites, so I painted them up.  Very nice models, they paint up easily and well.  I'm not sure that it'll be the very next thing I do - but there are Republican Romans in my painting future!