Tabletop Teacher

Simply the best end of term gift I've ever received, and that includes the bottle of champagne so expensive I had to declare it for tax purposes. As I was packing up my classroom after a hard day of getting students to learn about projectile motion (we played with water bottle rockets), two students of mine walked in carrying this thing between them: It's a battlefield!! Okay, it's made of cardboard and newspaper, and the glue is still drying, but how many teachers can claim to have gotten a hand made battlefield terrain set from their students! Here's some close ups:  Looking down on those corpse-worshippers  Looking up from the dreadnought bunker  Eagle eye view of combatants  View of the Traitor's Gate Teacher pay is not great, no matter where you work. There's certainly no bonus pay for good years or good results. But you do get gems like this, which I don't think other professions do. Good to be a t...

Well, I'm officially back from holiday, with school kicking off again tomorrow. I finally had some time to sit down and paint up some terrain for the club. Awesome evening lighting They're all quick jobs, and very easy to do. Starting with the Bastion donated by Tabletop Engineer. It was base coated in black when it was donated. All I did was give it a quick brush down with Leadbelcher, and then a focused dry brush of Mournfang brown for rust and mud.  This was donated by Games Workshop itself when I started the club. I gave it a spray of my Montana Stealth, a paint I bought to base coat my Tau. Unfortunately, the paint was quite water resistant, meaning layers on top tended to bead up, and not cover smoothly. It makes a great base for dry brushed scenery though! The whole thing was then dry brushed with Dawnstone, and a focused dry brush of Ulthuan Grey on the more exciting features. Basically the light grey only went on the dragon statue...

Just a quick one, as I am tired after a long journey. Tabletop Engineer has kindly donated a piece of high quality scenery to the club: Thanks very much Engineer! The student neophytes will have  great del of fun dry brushing and fighting over this new piece of Imperial masonry! Thanks for reading. If you liked what you saw, and you want to help out, please leave a comment. Sharing this with your friends, and following me on Twitter , Facebook or Google+ would also be hugely appreciated. If you have anything you want me to look at, let me know in the comments below. I'll probably be able to write an article about that topic within a day! If you really love what I do here, you can make a one off donation at my  PayPal , or become a true hero to table top education and make a regular donation to my  Patreon . Every Little helps!

Last time I talked about terrain it was how to make individual bits or movable terrain out of cardboard. However, despite the new terrain feature certainly enlivening matches, club members were still playing on the good old wooden varnish planet with curiously urban rock formations. It's miles better than the Battle of the Coke Can Forest, but we're still not done yet. My lab technician is an amazing help at school. He's ridiculously well qualified for the role, and is basically working as a tech for retirement. He's one of those old school engineers who will tend to disappear into a shed with a problem and come out of it with a bolted up solution freshly varnished and smelling of ingenuity. He scrounged up a few old cupboards and gave them to me. Sometimes I think he's watching and assessing my ability to come out of sheds with solutions. Hopefully the end product will do him proud! First step: Planning. My initial plan was to make them in...

Terrain makes for interesting games. Put it this way... every successful battle report provider, be they White Dwarf, Youtuber or blogger will have an interesting looking field to fight over. It sparks imagination, and puts you in the right frame of mind. At the beginning of my club, the battlefield was the amazing, and exotic, Varnished Wood planet, set in an ecosystem with frequent rains of sometimes corrosive chemicals. Erosion patterns somehow caused Low Gothic markings to appear, often talking about how 'Steve wos 'ere', indicating a strong Chaotic influence. There was a single structure, a tumbled down Imperial building donated by  student, but mostly what we had to play on were lab benches. In short, fairly rubbish. Games Workshop has been very helpful in this area, donating some really high quality Age of Sigmar terrain pieces, being constructed and painted as we speak. But it's not enough to keep the 4 tables we have running looking suitably aw...