PVA'd the staging post and covered with sand, brings out the block work at the base of the walls well. Just need to sort the base out for it and decide what I'm going to do on it, looking at some kind of Achaemenid sculpture type monument, with the option to change that for some sort of run down stable type building. Double click for bigger pictures.
Just quick update on my 15mm scale native villages, both based now, with sand and polyfila. just need to undercoat with humbrol black and paint then add final details. The beach mat walls have come out well, with the black under coat picking out the woven mat well.
I was in my early teens when the 1973 Yom Kippur War/October war took place, and have been interested in Arab Israeli wars ever since. At that time I also had a large number of 1/300 NATO/Warpac units, and gamed in this scale more than any other. Having bought the Cold War Commander rules at the Alunwell show in 2008 I started to plan out my forces in for this area, a Bar Lev line fort seemed the obvious place to start. Planning on ahead a SAM2 site on a CD and some sand banks for the Egyptian combat engineers to attack with their high pressure water hoses will also make it onto the list of projects for this area.
The pictures are WIP's I still need to put barbed wire around the fort and build a watch tower and put some radio antenna on the command building. The four bunkers are all 1p coin size to take my HMG and mortar stands. The sand bags area made from Miliput shaped with a scalpel blade. The main ground work was made from foam core board, cut to shape and them smoothed over with polyfiler to cover the joins, and PVA'd with sand when the filler had dryed out. The command building was made from Foam core and card off cuts.
I made this fort late last year, before Osprey published their book on Israeli Fortifications of the October War. So my fort is not based on any historically accurate information. If you do a search on flickr for October war you should be able to find some pictures from the 360 panorama painting of the Egyptian crossing of the suez canal from a museum just outside Ciro.
Three shots showing my other palm groves as they stand at the moment. The top two pictures show how I use expanded polystyrene as a base for areas of jungle/general vegetation, in this case with palm trees growing out of the under growth. They are painted in mat black acrylic so that any bits which I miss when covering them in vegetation are not so noticeable.
In the second picture down you can see a area in front of the jungle area which I have cut out of the base and will become a small pool.
In the bottom picture the are two fox holes cut into the poly-board base. With small piles of stone on the top to make it easier the remove the plugs of poly-board when the fox holes are activated.
This picture shows one of the huts cut out with the corners scored and folded, once you have done this the straw will be cut through on the four corners, exposing the card board underneath. So to cover this up, and to add more interest to the huts I've used match sticks and bamboo skewers glued to the corners of the huts as supports.
This picture shows the two villages, with the huts positioned on the CD bases, one with three and the larger with four huts on. The style of the huts is purely based on my imagination, I'm sure with a bit of research I could have found some striking designs, but I was looking to create some generic native huts which I could use in a wide range of different locations.
A close in shot of two of the huts showing the use of match sticks as corner supports for the huts and the ribbed card for the doors of the huts. The roofs are old towling soaked in PVA glue. Hope fully when I start to paint the huts, and with some sutler dry brushing the raffia beach mat walls should look quite effective.
An over head shot of the two CD bases with the huts on, I'll put some small patches of vegetation on the bases, along with an animal pen on one of them, and some piles of fire wood, also some beads painted up as cooking pots giving the villages a lived in look. the feeling that the item has a life of its own.
