Beach mat fun!

Take one worn out beach mat, the type with the cloth binding around the outer edge, with woven straw, yours for about £3 maximum, PVA onto card, not to thick, about 200gsm (birthday card weight of card) Use plenty of PVA. Let it dry overnight.


Now you need to decide how you want your huts to look, saw draw out your ideas, and draw up a plan of your huts, so you can work out how many huts you can get out of your beach mat.

Palm grove

Three shots of one of my 4 palm groves produced for my WW2 Fare east/Vietnam forces. I last posted a work in progress picture of one of these palm groves on January the 6th, well here at last is a finished one. The top picture is a close up of the fallen palm tree showing the roots end, the second picture shows the brown leaves, I'm quite pleased how this has worked out. In the bottom picture you can see in the centre of the base a circle with a small mound of stones in the middle of it, this is a lift out fox hole cut into the foam core bord, used for the ground work on the base. I just need to finish of the Japanese HMG to go in it.

28mm Staging post details

Some pictures showing the addition of some details to the building, all of the doors and planking are made from Coffee stirring sticks. The last picture shows the staging post on its 6" square base. The second picture also gives a good view of the brick work made from the foam exposed by removing the outer layer of card from the foam core board used the build the staging post.

28mm Staging post

Some pictures showing the basic structure for the centre piece of the village, based around my idea of how an Achaemenid stage post house would look, on one of the Persian royal roads which stretched from Egypt in the west right over to the Punjab in the east.

Built from foam board with small additions from scrap art board. you can see at the bottom of the walls where I have striped off the outer layer of card exposing the foam core and then using an old Biro pen to scribe on brick work. I've removed all the hard edges from the tops of the walls and tower with a sharp scalpel to give a weather beaten look to the building.

Next stage is to give it an all over coat of PVA and sand before under coating in black. The top picture gives the best impression of the overall proportions of the building.

28mm Walls & Fences

The walls and fencing in the above pictures were produced for use with my 28mm middle east / southern Mediterranean village which is used for skirmish gaming in a wide rang of periods. The more cover to hide behind the better. The fencing was produced using lollipop sticks split into rough lengths then hot glued onto an art board base with the ground work built up with filler then PVA, sand and small stones from the garden.

The adobe type walls were polystyrene packing which a clip frame came in. The more tumbled down sections were broken of along the top edge and had PVA and old fish tank gravel (nice rounded weather worn looking stuff) glued along the top edge to give the rough effect. Over all I think it gives a nice effect and when seen in combination with the buildings works well.

28mm Desert houses

28mm scale desert buildings made from foam core board scraps from work, figures are black tree design Nubian archers to give an idea of size, amphora out side the central house in the bottom picture are made from the tops of cotton buds. Wooden fence made from split lollipop sticks. The houses are based on 3" art board bases, which fit into my 2' square base boards. All my 28mm collections are skirmish forces, due to space restrictions. I'm looking at how I can make some lift off roofs, to make them suitable to use as Spanish peasant houses in the peninsular for my Napoleonic skirmish forces. My terrain items all have to work over as many locations and historic periods as possible. So these will be used from 500BC up to the 1980's for my soviets in Afghanistan.