Terrain

Rural Farm Buildings and Terrain work in progress

~ Colonel Mustard ~ Leave a comment

I had a fine weekend of starting some terrain projects. First of all using my excellent book “Making Rural Buildings” by David Wright. I have been planning to make a group of farmyard buildings for a while and the ideas and tips in this book are just excellent. David Wright also has his own web site called Dovedale Models which has more inpsirational ideas. I decided on his Dales Farm as my basis to create my new farm for Normandy. You can see a screenshot from his web site below. Using a base of 5mm foam board i created the shell of my first two buildings. Just cut out the sides of your building and PVA them together. Then i added a layer of PVA glue covered in DAS modelling clay that creates a skin we will carve into to make the stonewall texture. So i am up to the etching part next, and that will probably take me all week to finish, but i think will be worth it in the end.

While I was on a terrain drive i made a whole stack of sand bags and rubble from modelling clay. Adding this stuff to small strips of MDF creates some excellent obstacles and cover. i will need to texture the bases and then paint. I also had some metal oil drums from Sergeants Mess and some other bits and pieces that i also added in. The sandbags were easy to make, just roll out a length of modelling clay, flatten it slightly on a cutting board and then cut it into 5mm sections. The cutting action of the knife flattens each end of the bag nicely. Once you have stacked them up you don’t notice the different sizes that inevitably occur. So will write on more progress next week! Shame i have to go do my day job…….

Pork Chop Hill

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Nothing to do with the actual battle of Pork Chop Hill, i just liked the idea of calling a post that. But it does have everything to do with hills, and the construction of one. In the good old days (for me that’s the early 1980’s when Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran were wearing frilly shirts) my hills were books placed under random green blankets. These days my green mat is a massive improvement on the old blanket or the green painted ping pong table. But its too rigid to place items under it to create any hills or undulations on my wargaming table. After plenty of research and investigation i decided to have a go at constructing my own hills. This method is nothing new and all sorts of tutorials can be found on the net, but for a balance between value, visual effect and simplicity of construction i don’t think you can beat it!

I bought some polystyrene sheets 25mm thick from my art shop for a couple of bucks, plus some 3mm MDF from Bunnings, again a very cheap material. I cut out my required shape from the MDF, in this case just a simple oval shape. I then glued the polystyrene sheet to the MDF shape with PVA glue and left it weighted down overnight to dry. I reckon you can use any kind of polystyrene or insulation foam or similar. Once it was dry i cut the hill edge level with the MDF base, and then gave it a good sand with sandpaper until the contours were where i wanted them. Make sure you sand this stuff outside so you don’t inhale any nasties. That’s pretty much it. I gave the hill a thick coat of a cheap dark brown acrylic paint and then gave it a liberal coating of green flock. The flock i had is a close enough match to my green mat, well good enough for me anyway. I was pretty happy how the whole thing came out. Now i can make a bunch more of different shapes and heights to cover all situations. I am also going to make a big hill in two halves so it can be one big hill or two smaller ones that sit flush with the edge of the table. I also think grabbing some cork from the pet store and making a hill with a cliff will be a cool idea.

Check out the naked hill below and then the finished result!

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“Making Rural Buildings for Model Railways” by David Wright

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Sometimes i think that i enjoy making stuff far more than i actually enjoy playing games. A big attraction of this hobby for me is the never ending list of things to build and building techniques to learn. The list is endless and the challenge to improve my creations will never be satisfied, as there is always someone, somewhere who shows you something inspirational to aspire to! In the quest to improve my scenery and terrain, i found this book on an excellent web site called Book Depository and swiftly bought a copy. Published by Crowood Press i picked it up for under $30 delivered to my Australian doorstep.

What a great book. If you are interested in scratch building your own rural buildings then you should run out and get yourself a copy of this. David goes through every step of researching, planning, drawing and constructing various different types of rural building. Even though this is aimed at Railway People its application to wargamers is one hundred per cent relevant. Packed full of tips, tricks, reference material and step by step guides, it gives you all the tools to build your own very realistic scale models.

I had picked up various ideas and techniques from the internet, but this book puts it all together in one place and adds plenty of new ideas. Using foam board, modelling clay, cardboard and PVA glue is all you need to make some awesome looking terrain for your table. This is going to inspire me to rebuild my Normandy village from scratch, starting with a farm complex. I guess i am lucky to have the time to build my own, but ultimately its far more rewarding to see your own creations on the table in front of you.

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In The Greenwood Laser Buildings Part 2

~ Colonel Mustard ~ 1 Comment

I finished the second building i had bought from In The Greenwood and was very happy how it turned out. This was was the Victorian Terrace with some nice looking bay windows. Flat packed brilliantly into a small cardboard box these kits are really cool. They scale out quite nicely to my 1/72 scale stuff, i think being around 110 – 115mm high. Only costing around $20 on line, probably less now since Brexit, they are really good value compared to other MDF and resin model buildings.

Quite easy to build, i only struggled a bit with the bay windows, and didn’t get them totally square or straight….. next time i will do better. Although the designs are not necessarily for Normandy they fit in really well with all my other buildings, most of which are home made. The addition of some French looking adverts and signs will help the houses blend into the Normandy countryside. I have a corner shop left to build which i will get to next.

The backyards are particularly nice, with some sheds and outbuildings. I added a path and some grass out back to the rear gates. Just ready for some troops to hide out there ready for action…… Its turning into a smart looking MDF street.

 

 

 

All About Trees

~ Colonel Mustard ~ 2 Comments

For some reason the other day i was looking at my trees on my wargames table and was overcome with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the way they looked. As a consequence i then spent a long time surfing and researching buying or constructing new woods and forests to replace my old ones. You can go down the crazy expensive route of ready made trees from some of the big scenery producers, but these will set you back in excess of $10 per individual tree. They will look good but i really could not justify $150 woods. There were also plastic armatures available which you then construct, but these looked unnatural and fake in my opinion, and were not too cheap either. Then i read numerous tutorials on twisting wire into trees and covering with flock and foliage, or buying seafoam and doing the same. Even buying seafoam was going to cost me $50 before i had even created one tree. So every direction i turned looked financially unacceptable or too time consuming for my marginal patience levels. Time is money apparently.

As quite often happens in life, i ended up going full circle, right back to where i started, and dug out a pack of trees i had bought on eBay from Hong Kong or China somewhere. For $10 dollars, delivered to my door including postage, you can buy ten to fifteen trees, depending on height. Their colour was a little too martian or goblin green, so i sprayed them a dark foresty green to dull them down a bit. I then gave them a brushing with PVA glue and dipped them in some more coarse green flock. Then another coat of green spray paint to blend things in. This also keeps all the flocking on. The trunks and visible branches were painted brown and i mounted the trees onto randomly shaped MDF bases in groups of four to six. I added some modelling clay to the bases where each tree was to grow, so it was built up a little and meant there was more depth of base to insert the tree into. After covering the bases in sand and gravel and more green flock, i drilled a hole for each tree and glued them in.

So really i came to the conclusion that the best solution was to keep buying super cheap trees from China, but spending a little more time sprucing them up. For less than one dollar a tree you cannot go wrong. I think i need to make a walled apple orchard or maybe some lemon trees for my village…..

Charles Grant’s “Battle – Practical Wargaming”

~ Colonel Mustard ~ 3 Comments

While Gavin Lyall’s “Operation Warboard” was my number one, go to rule book, back in the eighties, “Battle – Practical Wargaming”, by Charles Grant, was my silver medal, or my second most read volume. Actually both books were my big brothers, and i just used to borrow them and read them over and over again. I decided to reenact one of Charles Grant’s scenarios from the book. Its a very simple joust between some Panzer IVs and some T34s. I changed it a bit and had a couple of troops of Panthers and Panzer IVs take on a troop of Shermans and a troop of Cromwells.

I based my terrain on the map in the book which you can see below. It gave me a chance to try out my new folding tables i picked up on Gumtree. I also repainted all my river sections with a paint thickening medium to create a wavy texture, then gave them a coat of greeny brown acrylic paint, plus a top coat of gloss varnish. I was really happy with how the end result came out, far more realistic than my previous bright green and blue artificial looking waterways.

Funnily enough my big brother is lining up as the opposition in this little fight. Only 30 years on since i borrowed his book in the first place……… Will post some action shots when battle commences.

Laser Cut MDF Buildings by In The Greenwood

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I had been scratch building all my own Normandy village constructions, but felt i needed to try out something professionally made to balance things out. Oh and i have also got kind of tired of foam board, balsa and modelling clay. On my internet travels i stumbled across the In The Greenwood Ebay shop and then their own web site at http://www.inthegreenwoodlaser.co.uk

They do a range of laser cut MDF buildings in HO scale which are excellent value compared to other companies i had a look at. At around $20 Australian per house i thought this was a pretty good deal, so i ordered three of them. Although I think they are aimed more at Railway people, and are not actually French but rather Victorian, i reckoned i could make them fit into my Normandy landscape without too much problem!

As with other HO Scale manufacturers i have investigated i was worried these buildings would come in too small compared to my own creations and also my range of 1/72 scale models and figures. What a happy chappy i was when they came in around 120mm tall including my extra MDF base and fit perfectly with everything else i had made. The kit comes Ikea style in a flat pack box, amazingly packed in. So i got to work building my first one which was the Victorian Pub. I decided to make it as a restaurant instead.

All the pieces are very cleanly cut and i only had trouble with the bay windows at the front, as the holes in the bottom section did not match up with the holes in the top, so i had to do some carving to get it all to fit together. The instructions follow a step by step process which are a little hard to follow as there are no diagrams, but as long as you are not Stevie Wonder wearing boxing gloves you should be OK. The whole kit goes together with a bit of PVA glue. I added an MDF base to keep it all together, and to create a garden area at the back. One great thing is that the roof can be left removable which is perfect for all you wargamers! I did add some supports inside the roof to give it some extra strength.

My Brasserie painted up nicely and i added a sign on the front and a Martini ad on the side wall, both ideas i borrowed from other designs i have seen out there on the internet. Overall these are great little kits and fit nicely into my village, i am looking forward to making the other two kits i purchased. Check out my village photos below and you can see the MDF constructions fitting nicely into my assortment of home made houses

Ruined Buildings Part 3

~ Colonel Mustard ~ 3 Comments

So finally after all that construction it’s on to the paint job! Everything was painted a black acrylic as a base coat or primer. That gives the whole thing a good starting point and makes sure all the shadows are emphasized. I painted the undamaged rendered walls first, one a sand colour and one a pale blue. The insides were all painted a dark grey as more than likely they would have burnt in the fires/explosions that must have occurred. Previously i have used wrapping paper with a very small pattern on it as wallpaper. You could easily find a pattern on line and then print it out to a small scale to use as wallpaper for some of the internal walls.

The rubble and debris was also painted dark grey and then dry brushed with lighter shades to a very light grey. The exposed brick was painted a mix of bright red and a terracotta red. I also painted random bits of debris with the same red as many bricks would have fallen around the house. To illustrate the mortar i used a fine brush and a light grey to draw thin lines in between the detail on the exposed brick. The bits of wood on the floor, the roof beams and the internal floors were all painted a dark brown. I left plenty of black on the roof beams to suggest the charred nature of the remains. All the window lintels and shutters were painted white, and needed a couple of coats to get them right. I just used a black biro to draw on the shutters, much easier than a paint brush.

The roof tiles were painted grey and then randomly painted with lighter greys to mix them up a bit. I left plenty of black areas near to blast holes. Finally i lightly brushed black around all the damaged bits to show the extra effects of smoke. To add that extra bit of detail i found some cool French signs on the internet, printed them out and stuck them on the buildings with a lot of PVA glue so they look painted on. A bit of green flock on the base and hey presto the finished ruins.

See my photos below including some British units just nosing around in the smoky ruins! Over and out Colonel Mustard.

 

 

Ruined Buildings Part 2

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I have continued working on my ruined buildings, and have decided to split the process into three blogs as otherwise it would be a bit heavy on the pictures. However, I did want to detail each part of the construction, so here goes!

To create the piles of debris inside and outside the ruins i first glued lumps of modelling clay at positions on the base next to the walls. I did this both on the interior and exterior in a random way, still leaving decent areas of the interior floor bare. I then covered these raised areas in PVA glue and sprinkled a decent amount of dirt/gravel from my front pathway on top. The stuff out the front of our house is perfect for producing random debris. You can see the construction taking shape below.

Next up i need to add a texture or render effect on the walls to get rid of the smooth finish of the foam board. I do this by mixing a fine sand (pinched from the play ground around the corner) with a paint thickening medium i found in my art box. You could do the same with sand and PVA glue mixed up. I then paint a liberal layer of the stuff onto all the exposed walls, making sure to stay away from the exposed brickwork and the window frames, and let it dry. This makes an excellent texture to paint on the outside of the houses.

To add a bit more character i needed to make more rubble and debris for around the place. The rubble i made with more modelling clay by rolling out a large flat piece to about 1-2mm thick and when it was half dry cut it into small cubes. I made a big pile of bricks and rubble this way. I also chopped up bits of balsa wood into broken beams and bits of roof. This extra debris was then glued on top of the original piles, and new small piles were also added just using the new rubble.

The whole building was then painted with black acrylic. Be careful not to use a cheap spray paint on foamboard as it can dissolve the inner foam part, and therefore would destroy all your hard work carving the brickwork. Last but not least i made a framework for the roof sections out of balsa wood and roof tiles out of more modelling clay. The damaged removable first floor sections were also made with balsa wood. I just drew floorboards onto the balsa wood using a biro which creates a decent paintable effect. So now all the bits are made all that is if left is to paint and construct. We will see the end result in Part 3!

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Ruined Buildings Part 1

~ Colonel Mustard ~ 2 Comments

I wanted to make some more ruined and battle damaged buildings for my table top, and thought i would document the process with the help of Colonel Mustard.

First up i drew up some rough plans and designs. There are plenty of places to get inspiration, the internet being the most obvious. I settled on making a house that has its centre completely blown out and a half flattened, heavily damaged cottage. I use 40mm per storey as my basic measurement (although in my drawings i did change to 35mm but then changed my mind back). Doors are 15mm x 30mm tall and windows 20mm square. I sketch out the basic plan and measurements as you can see below.

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For the base i use a 15mm border around the bottom of the building. In this case i only put a border around the front and back as i wanted to be able to place the ruins adjacent to each other with no gap to form a ruined terrace. My next step is to cut bases out of 3mm MDF, making sure you calculate the correct width and length of your building plus any border required. I then draw my building design onto 5mm foamboard. Most houses end up as four pieces as they are no more complicated than a box. I guess this is why i object to paying through the nose for purchased buildings as they are little more than an MDF or plastic or resin box that is decorated! I can do that for less than $30 per house.

Once you have accurately drawn your building cut it out carefully using a sharp knife. Try and keep the knife perpendicular so you cut straight through the foam and don’t leave any wonky angles. Cut out all the window and door frames too.

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I then cut away some of the card covering on the foamboard where the building render has been damaged. You can draw guidelines around some of the damaged walls and then cut through the card outer layer. Slide your knife under the card layer and peel if off carefully. Then with a ballpoint pen draw on exposed brickwork. When you press on the foam core it creates a texture which looks really good. Then its glue your box together on the base  with PVA glue and leave to dry.

Then its a question of cutting out 20mm x 5mm sections of balsa wood and gluing them into the windows as frames. i also add 20mm x 5mm balsa wood as window mantels and lintels. Above the doors i also put a 15mm x 5mm lintel. On the inside walls i add balsa wood beams halfway up the building, which indicate where the floor would have been, or if you do put some floor in they can act as supports.

At this stage our ruins look like this. In my next post we will do the building texture, rubble and debris, the roof and finally painting!