No Man's Land terrain and a few loose ends

Just a quick couple of updates of what I’ve been up to this week, and to start to tie up a couple of loose ends on this blog.

First, I’ve really being enjoying “Six Weeks”, which I mentioned in my post here. I’m about two-thirds through, and I shall let your have a proper review later this week. For a wargamer, there’s a great many insights and ideas which come from the book. It’s certainly worth the price for that reason alone. Perhaps far more importantly, though, in addition to being an excellent historical account of junior British officers in the Great War, the book is a deeply moving, sometimes harrowing and very respectful tribute to the sacrifice of those officers.

Second, and on a terrain making note, I’ve been finishing off the wooded terrain for No Man’s Land which I started in March. After a period of painting figures, it’s been great to come back to some terrain making.

You might remember I got to this point by late March ...

As always, I started with a plan of what needed to be done to carry the project forward. I always think that this helps me get over the “Oh Lord, it’s all too difficult stage” when going back to a half-finished project.

One of the first thing I wanted to do was to make the trees look a little more varied and less “stick-like”. I bought some plastic, bendy tree armatures a while back and these are great for bending into various shapes. They were perfect for the smaller branches which may not have been removed by the shelling, and made the trees slightly more varied.

I drilled the sticks with a fine hand drill and then glued in some small armature branches with epoxy resin (less brittle than superglue, as the trees may have a fair bit of handling at our local club).

Next, I wanted to make sure that the wood locating battens into which the wooded squares can be slotted were not too obvious and pronounced. I like using Milliput for this sort of thing - its pretty cheap, very hard when dry and easy to mould into shape. Although Milliput is a rough epoxy putty, as it was going to be covered in PVA and gravel scatter, that didn’t matter in this use of the material.

I wanted some variety on the “woodland” floor as well as in the trees. I cut some tufts from an old piece of rubber-backed floor matting and cut some suitable grass patches from an old set of towelling which I had dyed dark brown.

Then I rustled up a disgusting mixture of dark brown paint, polyfilla and PVA glue in an old contained which I spread onto the terrain board, wood sections and foam inserts with an old brush. I tend to do this pretty liberally, as the polyfilla adds a slight contour.

The, as with the other terrain boards, I scattered loose gravel and sand over, and pressed the brown towelling patches into, the brown PVA sludge. That got me to this point....

I was reasonably pleased with this interim step and felt that things were coming together. As you can see, the idea is to get a double use out of the woods – so they can be used on a normal non-modular terrain table, as well as each having a custom place slotted onto their home on the terrain board.

With the prototype shell-shattered woods I’ve made before, I’ve coated them liberally in PVA glue to prolong their lifespan and rough handling at the club. I did the same with the wood squares, mixing up some PVA, a little polyfilla and black paint in order to paint the trees. (For obvious reasons, this is best done after you have finished scattering gravel around!)

So, at this stage, things were coming together....

......which means that the last stage before painting is some detailing. I’d made a couple of interchangeable machine gun/ mortar/ command pits in the terrain board, and wanted these to have some sandbags around. There are loads of great tutorials on the internet telling you how to make these, so I won’t repeat the advice here. Suffice to say I made the sandbags with Miliput, pressing them out using a cloth (to indent a fabric pattern on the putty) and finished the detailing using a sculpting tool and a pin.....

OK, I’ll accept that the pin might have been going over the top a little ! That being said, I thought that adding the sandbag stitching was a fun thing to do on a couple of the sandbags. Finally, I wanted to have some of the trees with longer roots, again trying to make them seem more natural. I’d tried to do this on the Bourlon Wood test-piece I made a year or so back. Here’s where I got to this time....

So, there we are. Building done, with just the painting to do and then some micro-detailing. Hope you can join me for that this coming weekend.