TERRAIN FINISHED

So I have finally finished some terrain, in the past I have called this my Tusk Terrain, but realistically I think its better suited as a generic open field for any project that suits it, whether its a couple of Greek phalanxes facing off or a couple of Dark age warbands either way the terrain will work nicely, now design wise, the terrain has a dirt road starting from the bottom left corner making its way to the top right where it splits around a hilltop, it also has small concentrations of pine trees in opposite corners, with a few field rocks scattered around, aswell as small clumps of grass to break up the open field, this terrain shall make for a good place where a couple of armies can meet and fight man to man.

  

WINGS OF WAR COLLECTION

'Trenches of Europe'

                                                                  

This week I have a WOW (Wings of War) night planned with friends on Saturday night, hopefully we will see about six guys turn up for a 3 x 3 Allies vs Central Powers match up, there will be fast food, alcohol and hopefully lots of laughs, so for this post I am going to show off our (mine and my brother's) collection of terrain, planes and observation balloon.

'Observation Balloon'

                                                             

We have managed to collect a good mix of planes on both sides of the conflict, most of the planes that we have collected were in use from about early mid war until the end of the war, we don't really have anything that is early war and we don't have anything as far as the giants of the sky go, I'm talking about a zeppelin and the really large bombers, like the Staaken, these are on the too get list.

'Planes of the Central Powers'

                                                        

'The Allied planes'

                                                            

Here is a handout I did for the night with the scenarios that will be played on Saturday, simple and fun is the idea, fingers crossed I hope all goes well.

TUSK TERRAIN PT2

Ok, so I have continued on with my terrain piece, this time I have attempted to put in a lightly trodden path, I also wanted to accentuate the hills, as well as break up the green uniformity that a grass mat gives you, all of this for the purpose of making the terrain look as natural as possible, have I achieved this? I let you be the judge.... although I am happy with what I have achieved, I feel that it is still missing something, perhaps when I add the trees and other details it will look more complete, we will see.

Now the how to part... when I moulded in the hills and then glued on the grass (Refer my previous post) I looked at the finished product and thought this looks like a perfectly manicured lawn with hills, not very natural !, so I went to work trying to break up the perfect colour and perfect texture that a grass mat gives you, firstly I wet the grass in the form of a trail and let it dry, then proceeded to scrape some of the grass of to hopefully form a lightly trodden path, I wasn't thrilled with the result so I may go back and do more to the path at a later time.

After I was semi happy with the path, which helped to break up the perfect texture of the grass mat, I also added some grass tufts to random areas in the open plain area between the hills, this also changed the texture and created a more natural open field area, once this was done I wanted to deal with the perfect colour, so I did one thing that served two purposes, I used three colours from a spray can application, Natural Brown, Yellow, and a Grassy Green and I sprayed the base of the hills, this firstly broke up the perfect green colour that was present and secondly it acts as a visual aid for the height of the hills, it kinda frames the hills and gives them more depth visually, hope that makes sense, in addition to this I also sprayed in the floor of where I wanted the forrest line to be, that's about where I am up to with this terrain piece, I would love to hear what you guys think, I will post more about it soon.   

TUSK TERRAIN PT 1

I have started work on the terrain I will use for my Tusk Project, Its basically going to be an open valley surrounded with small Pine forests, plenty of open ground for Mammoths to roam freely and my hunters to do their nasty work, in the photo above you can see where I am up to, the planning and construction phase has been completed, all that is left to do now is to detail the terrain, trees, rocks, boulders and some down trodden tracks.  

All I did was buy a piece of MDF wood measuring about 120cm x 90 cm which was a good size for most of the scenarios included in the Tusk rule set, from there I got my hands on some packing foam cut them into a natural hillside shape and PVA glued them down to the MDF board.

then I used a general purpose plaster crack filler and covered them over, creating gentle sloping hillsides, nothing too high, just slight height adjustments, making them as natural as possible, once the plaster dried (I left it for 24 hours) I sanded it down for an ultra smooth finish, the sanding also blended the plaster seamlessly into the MDF wood.

Once all the plaster dust was cleaned off and the terrain board was spotless, I painted it with PVA glue a section at a time, whilst at the same time I rolled on a grass mat I picked up from a local hobby shop (I think the brand was Heki), I made sure to smooth out the grass mat as I glued it down to make sure there were no kinks in it, and BANG there you have it, an instant grassy field, was pretty easy, there is still lots too do, lots of detailing (most important part of the process), thats it so far watch out for PT2 soonish.

WW2 PROJECT EASTERN FRONT

Another small project started, this time on the Eastern front in some remote Russian village a Resistance group fights to survive against the German war machine, so with this project I will start it in the reverse, terrain first and then the miniatures, usaully I do it the other way round, so the sides will be something like this: 10 Resistance fighters take on 15 German Fallschirmjagers (paratroopers), in a close quarters gun battle, the Resistance will have the element of suprise, but the Germans will have the firepower .

The Russian Houses are log houses from Pegasus Hobbies and the church is from Lancer Miniatures, gates are HO scale fences from Atlas, all of these are in there raw form and are not even primed yet, I was playing around with the layout of the terrain to see what looks and works best for the scenario, I will start to work on the ground and surrounding forrests once I am happy with the layout of the buildings, I will post progressive updates soon.

MOVING HOUSE

Hi fellow bloggers and followers, I just wanted to let you all know that I am in the process of moving house (bought an apartment a couple of months ago, Yay me!), the blogging side of it has been real quiet, everything is packed up and boxed so there is no chance of getting much done here, its going to be this way until after the first week of june, which is not that far away right ?.... so for now, keep on blogging everyone! and here is a bit of a terrain teaser, this is my terrain for my zombie apoc project, its called 'Small Town USA' its not completely finished but its close enough, see you all in a few weeks.

'Small Town USA'

SMALL TOWN USA - STAGE 1

Stage one is now finished, what a marathon that was hehehe, I ran into so many problems, bad colours, other colours not looking 'right', shading issues, the list goes on, but its all done, well at least stage one is, what a sense of satisfaction you get... well the photo was taken with the terrain set out on carpet, not the best place to do it, with certain parts not aligning and some of the lines not matching up, but hopefully you get the idea and you can start to see Small Town USA form up, even if it is slowly.

So where to now ? onto stage 2, the next piece of terrain I am going to tackle is the centre area which will be the local town's central parkland, grass, trees and park benches, this I'm sure will be full of challenges as I have never made any terrain with grass, let alone trees and parkbenchs, should be fun-ish lol.  

SMALL TOWN USA

'The streets of Small town USA beginning to form'

So, I have started work on my terrain piece for my Zombie gaming project, at first I had no idea where I was going to base my project, a few ideas that ran through my mind were an underground secret bunker, some random deserted  army base on the outskirts of a country town and an industrial Russian train yard (stalker-ish),  but knowing the project was going to be expensive, involving buildings and other complex terrain structures, I had to make it generic so that I could use it for other gaming genres in order to maximise its use, more bang for my buck, bearing all this in mind I decided to go with a small US town just like the ones you see in the movies, this will be generic enough to host a few other genres including but not limited to SWAT like hostage rescues, Bank robberies (Heat movie) and many others.

 

'The Terrain in pieces'

These terrain pieces will form the foundation of the town, the streets and sidewalks, there is still a lot to do, including houses, shops, phone booths, parklands all the buildings that would be crucial to a Zombie scenario, putting it all together took a couple of days work, but it has come up nicer than I thought it would, once I slap a bit of paint over it, it should look real sweet. the terrain came with a lot of craters, so I went throught it and putty filled most of them to give the town a more sedate feel about it, the overall size of the terrain piece will be about 6" x 5", its going good so far, more updates soon.