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Its been a while since I have posted anything that I have actually worked on. I have taken to carrying around a little notebook that I can jot down my thoughts in so I don't forget them. This has been working out fairly well and today I decided to see if one of my ideas was going to work or not. I had this vision of a little sci/fi diorama featuring British troops from the Colonial Period (Zulu War kind of feeling) trying to ambush a "patrol" of aliens. All the minis are going to come right out of the Reaper Miniatures Chronoscope line and I had them already in the pile of unpainted lead.

I grabbed my favorite material for creating a mock up and off I went.

Matt Board, Ruler, Mechanical Pencil, some Titebond Glue sitting where I won't spill it.

The Sketchbook I have been carrying around

Deep into construction at this point

Coming together

"The Interior", I think I'm going to work in two windows instead of one.

The interior with a floor now!

On the outside the stairs in the alley

Street side which mostly features the sidewalk and a bit of the street

I think this will be the main viewing angle

So how the miniatures in the alley might fit. Some conversion work is going to be required

Two in the alley and one inside

The aliens make their appearance. You can see the alien shadows on the wall. When I paint this I'm going to try out a lower light coming from directly down the street so that the aliens will be casing shadows in front of them. That's what the British officer will be watching, timing his moment to strike.

Another view with all the minis in the scene

At the moment I'm pretty happy with how things worked out with this mockup. I can see some places I will need to make adjustments and where some conversion work will be required. I think its going to work out pretty good. The story seems pretty solid at this point.

I was messing around with the camera tonight and took some street scenes of the Shopping diorama and then de-saturated the photos to get that gritty reporter on the scene look.

Yes, yes, I got sucked in by a sale. With the upcoming release of Traveller 5 I working on getting my old campaign started again. Some where in the depths of the basement is a good sized stash of the old Martian Metals miniatures but 15mm Sci/Fi miniatures have come a long way in 30 years so I decided I would invest in some new miniatures for a new group of players. That's when I noticed that GZG (Ground Zero Games) was having a sale so I opted to order some and see how they looked up close and personal. They have some very nice civilian types but not really any suitable for my players' characters. This will fill in nicely for everything else though. They have been cleaned and primed and a little painting has been started just to get a feel for painting some 15s again. I'll have to set them aside for a bit while I work on my TYW Danes for the convention though. Here are some pictures of them coming pretty much straight out of the packages:

Armed Civilians A
 Armed Civilians B
 Armed Civilians C
 Civilians A
 Civilians B (I think I going to name one of the chicks that's drinking Anne)
 Security
 Techs (I think these guys are going to be a lot of fun to paint)
 Vac Suits
 Vac Suits with weapons