Hedges

I’ve made two trenches of hedge/bocage style cover for the table, and wanted to share both what and how I’d put them together. be warned though they fall into the “quick and dirty” camp, so might not be for everyone.

 

So these were the first hedges I made, allright, but not very inspiring, I thought I could do better. these are a cheap scouring pad, a bit of hardboard for the base, some aquarium gravel and some styrene to build the gate. static grass on the base, flock on the scouring pad, job done.. I photographed the build of the next batch I made, and also made some improvements.

I made them shorter sections for a start..

The stone walls are built up with hot glue and aquarium gravel.

Dump a bunch of the gravel out into a tray or suchlike

run a bead of hot glue on the board….

Dunk, and allow a second for the glue to cool and bite…

run another bead of glue atop the pile, dunk again.. repeat until desired hieght is reached, then shake off any loose ones…

I glues a few tree armatures and scouring pad bushes into some of the sections

and that’s it, very quick very easy.. paint them, flock them, add clump, bushes etc

the final product looks like this:

and yes, regular reader theese are the “new” trees from part 2 of my treesperiments, more on them, next post!

Thanks for reading.. till next time

Make hay while the sun shines…

or, well, doesn’t shine..

yeah, so I made hay.

I’d started to put together this lean-to as part of a set of scenery for the farm I’ve made for WW2 games, and realised I needed some hay bales, but that ideally I needed a few, so in a fit of “just getting on with it” I set to:

I made a few blocks of blue foam about the right size…

sculpted in some rough detail, pricking the end with a needle and scoring the sides and top..

I then tied them up with picture hanging wire as you might find in a certain sweedish furniture shop..

then I grabbed an old greenstuff box and some plasticene, and set them atop it..

mixed up and poured some silicone rubber..

after 24 hours curing, I de-molded them and cleaned up the molds.

mixed up and poured some resin..

this sets up in about thirty minutes so I was able to repeat this several times fairly quickly

and dress my lean to, as well as making a few freestanding piles of hay bales.

 

now I know they look a bit rough, but this was all done and painted in a few hours effort, so I’m not complaining

Treesperiments–part 2!

So as the previous treesperiment post suggests, I wasn’t totally happy with the results..

The one’s I thought looked the best were the “fine leaf foliage”, and as I said in the previous post, it looked like seamoss, painted and flocked.. soo…


I had a few armatures left over…


And a box of seamoss…


I sprayed some dark grey primer on the seamoss. I used my airbrush but an aerosol would be fine too..


Glued up some armatues…


And went to town.. this is three armatures, one with “fine leaf foliage” from woodland scenics, and two with sprayed seamoss. sure there’s no comparison right now, but that seamoss isn't flocked yet..


And it just so happens I have some pretty decent leafy noch foliage I’ve been using for bushes…
I’m quite happy with this final form of tree, and will be getting hold of some more colours of the nock foliage for future trees..


I hope these two articles have been of use, and that we can all look forward to better trees in our future!

Treesperiments–part one

In an earlier post I showed off some of the terrain I’ve been dabbling with, allbeit in a slightly cryptic and not very “here is my terrain” kind of way… I’m going to try and rectify that in a few forthcoming posts. so let’s use this one to talk about trees.

I was very happy with the aesthetic of the trees I built last time out, but repeated use has seen my initial concern about their fragility morph into their almost total destruction. so I set about trying to find a new way.

first let me say that I’m not a fan of the overly plasticy warhammer wood.. on a themed table of cartoony warhammer stuff it looks great, like you’re playing warcraft for real but when aiming for a bit more veracity it’s harder to see it fitting in.

Model railroad guys seem to do okay, so what I did was buy some woodland scenics tree armatures and a few types of foliage and set about making trees.

The armatures arrive flat, and with their own base plugs, so after some twisting to make them look a bit more “tree-ey” I glued them down to some old tree stand terrain I had already – my “dead forest” was in dire need of refreshing having not been used for some time, so it got repurposed.

voila, trees glued to wood. awesome. a little filler (spackle) was applied next to blend in the trees and some cast rocks glued down as accents, along with the odd dead twig to stand as a broken tree.

spackle applied..

I’ve opted to use three different types of foliage here, partly to test them out and also for variety, I have “bushes” which is a quite dense foam clump product; “underbrush” which is a similar, but looser product and “fine leaf foliage” which seemed to be something akin to the seamoss from my earlier attempt at tree making, but painted and flocked..

Next I used woodland scenics hob-e-tack.. and yes it really is worth buying the wait time is important too. basically, glob it on, wait fifteen minutes or so, and youll have the stickiest tree armatures in Christendom, just ripe for dunking in your flocking of choice.

in the wait-time I applied several types of ground cover and static grass to the bases for the tree stands.

This is the overall result, a reasonably satisfying set of trees and bases to use as woods in games..
I was however not totally happy, and set about refining the process.. look to treesperiments part 2 coming soon!

I hope that had some value to any budding arbourialists.. coming up next, some more terrain, and some painted stuff.. hopefully..

Dark Vengeance Rune Priest - Wot I did

Nothing too complicated about what I did here tbh.. most of it was scraping off icons and adding wolfy bitz..

The starting bits....

and with icons removed.. heres a tip, use plastic glue.. the thin stuff we used to call "liquid poly" to melt surfaces clean and smooth....

the wolf arm and the donor sword.. I left it as a sword instead of using an axe mainly because I liked the sword.. I did make some modifications to the hilt to make it more "celtic"

the backpack got some donor parts to wolf it up.

and once the chap was all kitbashed and assembled i set to making some fur..

Here he is in primer...

I'm fairly confident I could set this guy up for any chapter, so it seems my fears about the usefulness of the DV box may have been exaggerated...