Monday, June 18, 2012

Terrain

All this purchasing of figures for solo games and the fact that all my terrain is sitting on a table far away has meant I have decided to get more terrain. When I say get, I mean make and so I have been on a terrain baking project that is going suprisingly well, and a rather out of hand !

For a Eben Emael skirmish I started by making a Casemate out of some foamboard and a pillbox out of a yoghurt container. The 15mm figure is to show the scale, pretty quickly (and roughly) put together but all the materials were free. Sure I could have bought one of each for $10 but why not get the creative juices going.




Then I thought it would be a great idea to make some larger buildings for some more ww2 skirmish games. The below are half done, a station house and a storeroom, painted but with most bits needing highlightng - made form foamboard and a weetbix box with a dash of PVA.. I plan to base them and add some Vine\Ivy to hide some of the crappier finish I have done on it. The first building I've made so Im not complaining, but I need to weather them a little as they are seem rather glossy !


 So while I was making them I remembered I had a half baked Airfix Dutch windmill somewhere that I attempted to make several years ago. A quick recce of the shed found the box and so this has been added to the queue. Ive lost some of the bits so I will need to craft some addons to make it complete (Like doors and such)




I have two ww2 rulesets I wish to use - Hell by Daylight by Jim Webster, and THW NUTS plus Blood of the Risers US Airborne supplement. HbD is for partizan type games which I plan to use for a scenario and NUTs is well, looking pretty good. The campaign in the US Airborne book is ingenious and the rules strike me as bing very exciting. I have 3 THW rulesets from various periods and I quite like them. of course the US Airborne supplement has 10 linked scenarious for Normandy, and as I have a tonne of 15mm Germans, US and Brit Para's Im going to play these out solo. but of course I need the highlight of all Normandy tables........bocage. The below is a test run I made to see how it would go. The base is some "plastic-iey" stuff that was used in the box our TV came in, cut and PVA'd to a base. Applied some filler, painted it black and then turf colors and then glued varying shades of flock\clump foilage to it, and I am quite impressed at the results.


 The test bocage ! I have noticed though I have no consistancy between stands, so need to hide some pretty bad join lines if two bases are side by side.



  

It has been fun, but has taken me a little while to get done but now I know what I'm doing (or not) I can get a bit more done each night. so much done in fact the last hour of each night is spent adding more stuff to the list - barbed wire, dungeon walls etc etc as well as painting more 15mm stuff (ww2, fantasy, napoleonics...)

"Her indoors" has raised on valid question - where am I going to store all that "junk" lol and I dont actually know BUT at least I am recycling.

3 comments:

Rodger said...

You have been busy Paul! Really like the bocage. I use the likes of ivy to hide things that are a bit dodgie too. Very nice work all round mate.

Archduke Piccolo said...

Looking pretty impressive so far Paul. Perhaps some Matt varnish might be the caper for glossy buildings (though the come out OK in the photos.

An alternative idea is to paint the buildings using water colours. I used to pinch my daughter's paints (once they had already been well used, of course!). No worry about gloss there. My point about pinching young 'uns' paints is that you don't need to go to great expense with these; 'el cheapo' kiddy paint boxes will last you quite a while.

Jacko said...

Thanks for the comments, I use a lot of cheap pain for scenery and some test posts, though I guess the buildings simply need a little weathering