Saturday 30 December 2017

From JohnM: More Terrain, I'm Afraid

I suspect terrain pieces are a little more boring than figures, but I had quite a bit sitting around so I am happy to get a lot of it painted.

My gaming area is quite a mess, mostly because of the amount of terrain I have accumulated over the years. I am working to thin it out now and this means tossing stuff I will never use and get things painted that I might use. I saw some nice rolling bins at the Container Store the other day that will do well for terrain storage but the stuff is a little pricey so I want to make sure I utilize it to the maximum.

First up are some resin hedges that bought in a Kickstarter a couple of years ago from a company called Small Terrain, which unfortunately went bottoms up. A shame really as their pieces were quite nice. As you can see I bought quite a bit, roughly 18' I believe. Over the last couple of days I painted up the 8" pieces, I still have a number of 4" pieces to paint as well as some 6" corners.

They were primed black; the greenery was then heavily drybrushed with Thalo Green, then Sap Green 1:1 mixed with white followed by a light drybrush of Cadium Yellow. The dirt was heavily dry brushed with Raw Umber, then Raw Sienna followed by Titanium White. The rocks were then picked out with black, and successive lighter greys. As you can guess from the names I use Artist Acrylic Pastes, a little expensive maybe but great for this type of work.
As you can see they are 25mm high as you can just see these 28mm Alban Miniatures.
Maybe a little high for 1/72 but will do as hedges, not really tall enough for bocage .
We have a 140" here, almost 12'
I have done a lot of searching around for stone walls for my 1/72 WWII games and I found that for the price Italeri hard plastics are the best value and quality. Here we have 1 sprue, I have 8 sprues to paint. They very easily form corners and each sprue has a gate and nice end pieces. They are quite stable on gaming mats and do not tip over like some other wall I have used. 

Each Sprue has about 3' of walls
I think about 20mm high
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Great work John. Though it's taking a little work to figure out the inclusion of terrain seems to be striking a cord with a lot of people and I'm delighted that you're getting to work on some things that you'd normally not during the winter.

Those hedges look very nice and quite robust. As you say, it's a shame that the business went under as I think there'd be a few interested in picking some of these up. The tip on the Italeri is excellent, I didn't realize they sold walls separately. I'm going to have to check that our for my own 20mm collection. 

John tells me that this haul would fill over three 6x6 cubes so lets call it 60 points for the lot. 

A tidy return on your investment, John!


13 comments:

  1. Lovely, useful bits of terrain.
    Best Iain

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  2. Nice and one can never have too much terrain.

    Christopher

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  3. One always needs more terrain!

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  4. This is an excellent entry in the terrain category, John!

    You never want to run out of terrain, so hedging your bets is probably a good idea. Nobody will take a fence or accuse you of stonewalling.

    Though the lads and lasses are starting to refer to you as "John de la Terrain Neuve"...

    I'm here all week, enjoy the buffet!
    ; )

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  5. You can never have enough hedges! Nice work John.

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  6. Nice work, John! As has been noted, you can never have too much terrain...of course you seem to have hit it as you are ridding yourself of some! ;)

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  7. Looks excellent and will certainly come in handy in a number of games.

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  8. very useful for multiple games and periods, excellent work!

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  9. nothing wrong with good terrain John, yours is top notch.

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