Terrain Matters and a New Tank

This weekend's hobby time was devoted mostly to some terrain matters. First off, I cut down to size the large piece of felt I had found to cover my entire 6' x 4' table.

I say, "cut down" because I intentionally purchased a piece that was about double the size of my table, so that I could use the excess to make tree skirts.

I'd been bothered for a while about how the color of my tree bases don't quite match my felt. Then it occurred to me that I could use excess felt of the same color to make tree skirts (like with a Christmas tree).

Like any other terrain base, if the model is on the tree skirt, it's considered to be in the cover of the trees.

While I was at it, I took the time to cut some gray felt to make roads and paved areas for buildings. Just as with the tree skirts, the paved areas will act as an abstract way to show that a unit is in the building.

Finally, just because I was in the mood, I put together and painted a Sherman tank by Armourfast.

Enemy Contact! – First German Infantry Models (and Some Eye-Candy)

One half of my first squad of Germans is complete – squad leader, LMG gunner and assistant, and two riflemen.

You may notice that the building in these photos is certainly not constructed by me. As I am at the completion point of two massive multi-year projects at work, I decided I would reward myself by throwing budgetary considerations momentarily to the wind and buying some buildings from the Miniature Building Authority.

MBA's buildings come pre-painted, and of course, run a little bit higher than unpainted buildings from other companies, but it's not like I'm going to build a massive Stalingrad-esque urban area with them. I just need a handful to represent part of a small town or village in Normandy or along the Siegfried line.

MBA makes some nice-looking buildings, far better than anything I've attempted to construct or paint. I like these so much I may well pick up just a couple more (but really just a couple, I don't think I could possibly afford more than that).

Terrain Project: Ruined Building

I spent some time yesterday and today working on a ruined building for my WWII project. I used a method similar to one shown on Tim's Wargaming Stuff blog, only where he used wood, I used foam core. But the idea for this totally came from Tim's blog, and I want to give him credit.

First, following Tim's technique, I printed a Dave Graffam "World War Ruins" model on card stock, and cut out the wall and floor parts I wanted to use. Then I traced the card stock print-outs onto pieces of foam core and cut them out as well. My cutting of the foam core was not perfect, so the printed images and the foam core did not always match exactly. But it seemed to turn out okay for a ruin (I think one would have to be much more careful if doing a "clean" building this way). I then glued the print-outs to the foam core.

I wanted the two walls to have a flush corner. To make this work, I had to cut down the floors slightly to match the space lost due to wall overlap. Then I used a hot glue gun to put the pieces all together.

This left an unsightly joint on the outside corner, so I did a "Microsoft Picture It" editing job on one of the corner layers that comes with the Graffam model which I then cut out, trimmed to size and glued onto the outside corner.

Finally I painted the foam core grey along the edges and on any spots in the walls (e.g. window areas and wall edges) where the print cut and the foam core cut did not match exactly.

All in all, I'm fairly satisfied with the final result, especially considering it was a first try. This is an inexpensive way to go for building terrain, and I could probably make enough of these by November to have a small village as part of my terrain pool for a Platoon Forward campaign.