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!

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…..