I'll add some pictures soon/eventually - but briefly:
- I use the two foot TSS (click here for site) terrain boards
- I also use their hills...
- Most of my buildings are by Hovels (click here for site) - specifically I have the farm and barn which are items 23AC and 3AC respectively from their ACW 25mm range..
- I have bridge/walls which are 30+ years old (!) and are by Bellona...
- tree's are K&M..
- then I use assorted bits and pieces of carpet tile to break up the billiard table effect of the boards. These were gleaned from all over - including some I got from a man at the rubbish tip, and some I got from a bin at work!
- I also have some split rail fences which were scratch built by myself..
Redoubts/EarthworksHaving been endlessly impressed by the terrain building I see elsewhere on the web (and also in the new series in "Battlegames"), when the time came to find some earthworks for the next AWI game, rather than go and buy them I decided to build my own...
In "Battlegames" the author recommends the use of flower arrangers foam (the material that flower arrangers poke the stems into), but as I'd already spotted something else that I thought would do the trick, I went with my first choice. Anyway without further ado - here's how mine came to see the light of day...
Materials:
I'd been wandering round the local DIY superstore and I'd spotted some quarter round dowel (the stuff they use for beading, picture frames, etc.) in various sizes - I bought two lengths (they're about a metre long), one of about 20mm radius, and the other slightly smaller... I used the 20mm radius for this project as my figures are 25mm. Other materials used were some Starbucks wooden coffee stirrers (never let it be said that there isn't something you can use for wargaming in almost any environment!), standard wood glue, some plastic card, some matches, a scoop of gritty sand off the local beach, and also PVA glue.
I started by cutting some of the dowel with an angled edge to make the redoubts - dowel is tough stuff, I used an electric saw, but if I was to do this again then the flower arrangers foam would be the better choice...
In order to get the traditional shape the angle of the cut needs to be greater than 45'(otherwise you end up with a right angle on each corner!); being an artist rather than a scientist (who would have sensibly made a template) I did mine by eye as I wanted something that looked like it had been built in a reasonable hurry...
The bases for my figures are 5cm square, so I made sure that the front of the redoubt was slightly bigger than this, the sides were about 3 - 4cm's. I also cut off a number of straights of 10cm or 5cm's to use as trench sections.
Once they were cut, I put a good gloop of wood glue on the bottom and stuck them down to some bases made from plastic card, these were big enough for an overlap all round the model. When doing this, press the dowel down so that the back edge of the dowel goes down first, pushing excess glue towards the outer face of the trench. For the redoubt you can also put a good gloop on the join between the front and sides. Don't worry about drips you're aiming to have a nice overflow on the front edge of the trench/redoubt.... while it's still wet, sprinkle the gritty/sand mix all over them. You can see what I mean here - notice how the sand "gathers" on the glue at the bottom of the trench face...
Put them to one side to dry....
Once they were dry, I then cut the stirrers to make planks for the base of the redoubts, I also cut match lengths to act as reinforcements for the uprights.
For the stirrers/planks I again used plenty of glue, and sprinkled more sand. Once I'd finished I put them aside again to dry - they were looking like this at this stage:
Once they were fully dry, I then gave them a thinner coat of PVA glue on what would be the outer face of the trench, and the ends, and dipped them into the sand again - I was looking for texture now:
Once they'd had time to dry I gave them a light brush to get rid of the looser sand before I then gave them a really good coat of black primer as preparation for painting. This is them:
...and this is them with some figures for scale....
With the pieces all well and truly dry following the black primer under coating, I checked out the paint box to see what options I had.... in my mind I saw the pieces as predominantly brown (ie. soil), but I wanted a slight differentiation for the planking, and certainly for the redoubts the bases were big enough that there would also be undisturbed grassy area's...
For the brown's then I used these:
The little one is "Earth brown" and is by a company called
Miniature Paints - I think I may have picked it up at the Redoubt show a couple of years ago - not brilliant coverage/opacity, but it is the right colour for the job!
The three bigger bottles I picked up at Hobbycraft a few months ago on the grounds that "they might be useful"...again, not brilliant opacity as they're quite cheap, but they do the job.
Painting was pretty simple - because the pieces were black undercoated, and the opacity for the "earth brown" is not the best, I started off with a fairly medium dry brush of the "Sandstone" over the entire model to give it a light key to put later layers of colour on.
Once that was done I then used the "Soft Suede" (is 'hard suede' a different colour do you think?!) on all the wood sections of the model. I did the wooden bits first as any over brush from later stages would then just look like the planks were muddy, rather than providing evidence that my painting skills are not the best!
Next step was the heavy dry brush of the "earth brown" over all the earth parts, followed by Games Workshop "Dark Angels Green" for all the grass area's (I painted this rather than dry brushed)..
For all the dry brushing by the way, I use a half inch flat head brush that I picked up at Hobbycraft at the same time I picked the paints up. It's a nice brush for dry brushing - not too soft, or too stiff...
To all intents and purposes, by this stage I was almost done - looking at the models though, I decided to give a very light dry brush of the 'tan' over everything (just to highlight basically), and because the planking still looked a bit too clean I gave all the woodwork a wash of "Windsor and Newton" Peat ink.....
Once that was all done they looked as follows:
The last job was to apply PVA and flock to the grass area's, plus the usual small stones and Woodland Scenic shrub material. For the flock stage I also spotted some PVA on to the trench front for a little extra colour... and this is them done - just in time for the game tonight!
Overall I'm very pleased with them - reasonably quick and easy to make, and I especially liked the effect you get with the sand on glue. Gives a very nice rough texture which is ideal for dry brushing...
Night of the long knives.. Follow this
