>>> After the move of LAF from the german to a uk server I realised shortly after that most of the pictures of this thread had vanished, although they had been stored in my LAF gallery. 39 pictures had gone mysteriously into nirvana ... I struggled a while if I should upload them again and replace every single one to the appropriate text passage, realising that it would be much work. But in the end - and looking forward to a new convention game showing the mine - I did it. So if you like, you can follow the work-in-progress once again and hopefully wouldn't mind that I unearthed this older report of mine. May 26th 2018 <<<
Having had a rather large and labour-intensive game last year at the Crisis show in Antwerp ("Worringen 1286"), we decided at the club to go for a more relaxed approach this year and have a participation game with western theme called "Once Upon a Time in Mexico". I took the part on building the required gold mine. This Work-in Progress thread will show you how I did it.
After going into some research into my books and the net, I did find a lot of historical material about mines in the west, but most pictures showed either much too large mining complexes to be transferred into tabletop terrain or the typical small scene showing a group of miners washing for gold with their pans at a small river bed. I had also admired to Wolfgang's fantastic terrain pieces and his old west mine, but that was a bit too barren for my taste; his western town here
http://gidian-gelaende.de/Material_HP/Wolfgang/Westerngelaende/album/index.html (unfortunately this site is no longer available!)
By pure coincidence when browsing a bookstore some weeks ago I looked through a "That was the Wild West"-book aimed for the youngers and found what I was after: a splendid illustration by Peter Dennis, who is, after the death of Angus McBride, my favourite illustrator.
I instantly knew that I wanted to transfer that into a nice terrain piece.
For a start a 5 mm Forex sheet (kind of polystyrol) was cut to the dimensions we had decided upon for the space available in the game context, and after cutting and rounding the edges some foam boards were cut to size and glued upon with contact glue to get some height levels. Quite heavy bottles filled with sand were used to press everything on a flat surface overnight.
More foam was glued on to gain height, and the first rough layout was scribbled with a marker:
The foam layers were cut and smoothed out to a more realistic terrain contour, and the first rock and stone structures were sculpted using "Keramiplast", an air-hardening modelling clay. This stuff is easy to handle with just some water and has the consistency of clay. The fact that is will shrink a bit and thus produce cracks was very welcome this time ...
The top layer of the foam was cut in a 90° angle to get in the mine tunnel later. The tunnel entrance would be build separately using woods strips over a wooden frame.
Now for some pics about the tools of the trade that came into use for sculpting the rock strata:
Crumbled aluminium foil for pressing the soft clay to get some basic stone like textures, and two selfmade scribing-/cutting tools for the more prominent rock cracks and stone structures:
Real rock pieces were used as refererence for the structures, but also for pressing them into the clay directly using some water to avoid the clay tacking to the stone surface:
Coarse grit I collected years ago on an italian beach will be used later for loose stones and all the debris at the bottom of the rock formations:
In between those times waiting for the glues or the clay to set firmly, I looked through my collection of terrain pieces and the ever present lead mountain for anything usable for this project. The chinese laundry from Peter Dennis' painting should appear in the scene, and I found a nice and perfectly fitting Snapdragon old west shed I had roughly pre-painted some years ago. There were only minor details to add:
This tree trunk plus sign, also from Snapdragon, was cut a bit smaller at the base and will also be integrated into the scene:
Now on to some figures to be used: the only new bought ones were the miners from HLBS plus some mining equipment like the cars. Some Foundry Old West veterans were dug out of my large lead mountain
So, that's it for the first post. Hopefully not too long and boring. Next time it's going into some more detail work with the mining tunnel and water troughs plus support construction and of course more rock formations ...