Bonjour Number Ten

bonjour TiYo, Thought I better say Hi to my tenth follower, I hope you find the blog interesting. Fell free to leave comments, I'll try and answer any questions you may have.

You have some nice terrain on your ambush alley sight.

Regards

Airhead

Limestone hills

A set of four photos showing the basic construction of a set of two limestone hill sections, one on a two CD sized art board base the other on a three CD size base. The main building material being the good old toilet roll tube. In the top picture you can see the guide line around the middle of the toilet roll tubes where they were cut in half, with the top sections that were cut of, being used to build up the bulk of the mountains. In the bottom picture you can see on the background hill, paper templates cut out and put into position on the hills, these templates are then used to mark out the tops of the hills from foam core board. Which is then cut out and hot glued into place. Double click on the middle two picture for bigger versions

15mm Pine cone palm trees

A quick and easy way to make some different looking palm trees, OK so I've never seen palm trees that look anything like this, well perhaps at a stretch palm oil trees. But hay they look good to me and that's what counts. Made from small pine cones with my usual masking tape and wire palm leaves hot glued on top of the pine cones, then the pine cone is hot glued on to a 2p coin and the ground it built up with cheep pound land filler and then PVA'd and sanded. Double click on picture for bigger version

Shell Holes

15mm Scale shell holes made from silver foil pie cases, (Mr Kippling style, UK pie brand) hot glued onto an art board base cut to a 3 CD size base. Used to represent Naval bombardment or Vietnam Arch light type air raids. Not 100% happy with the results achieved. The edges of the holes have quite a jagged angular look to them. To my mind the edges should be more circular and softer in appearance. I might re-visit these at a later date. I'm sure that with the addition of some filler I could soften them off, and achieve a better effect. Double click on picture for bigger version

Final Beach Mat villages

I've finally finished my two native villages for my Fare East WW2 and Vietnam forces, they could however be used for any number of locations and time periods. The two top pictures of the four hut village show the small area of garden with the plowed soil and fire wood stack, the bottom picture shows the cooking pots made from small beads.

The three hut village again showing the effect achieved with the beach mat walls. See earlier posts for WIP pictures of how I created the huts from an old beach mat. Both villages are based on old CD's. Double click on the top 2 pictures for bigger version

High Ground

With flat base boards, I need to produce some high ground, not true mountain scale hills. More like rolling soft hills. Not to block movement on the table, more to provide cover and block lines if sight. The main thing that has made this work for me is a great product called mod rock in the UK. Its gauze bandage impregnated with plaster. Think of the old style broken leg style plaster casts, that's the stuff. Got mine from Hobby craft for about £5 for a roll. As used by sculptures.

On the left of the picture you can see the art board base, two CD's in size, and with the skeleton structure of foam board hot glued into position. To the right is a 3 CD size base with the mod rock on. I've found that to avoid the art board base becoming to wet and warping when dried out. Its best to cut the Mod Rock into lengths of about 4 -5 inches, dip into a bowl of water, then quickly squeeze out most of the water, so that when you apply the mod rock to the card skeleton its not over saturated with water.

Once the Mod Rock has dried out you will still be able to see some of the gauze showing, so I go over it with a thin layer of filler and then PVA and sand it, and add in some small rocks to Finnish it of Double click on pictures for bigger version