Terain Tiles

The past six weeks or so has seen me go off on a lengthy terrain-building project.

It all came about when we decided we would put on a Rorke's Drift game next year and I realised I had no really suitable terrain for it.

Casting my net wide I found a good article on the Matakishi's Tea House website (warning, it has so many good ideas that you are almost certain to be pulled off onto one hobby tangent or another) where he described in detail how he made a durable terrain tile system from cork flooring tiles.

I went to the local hardware store and bought a small stock of tiles and got to work with PVA to laminate them together in pairs to produce the basic tiles.

More pictures of them can be found in recent posts on the Fugitives' Drift game. In their basic form they looked pretty good and would make decent arid terrain, but pictures from the area around Rourke's Drift show quite a verdant scene.

Besides, I wanted the tiles to be useful for my Seven Years' War games and to work with the drop-on Built Up Areas that I put together last April.

Ebay has many vendors of cheap paper-backed grass matting so off I went and bought a few 50 x 50 cm sheets. Each of these serves to dress two tiles - one whole one and a few partials that I can fit to the leftover areas of the sheet. So, again it's out with the watered down PVA and the four-inch brush. Once glued on they get weighted down overnight between a  couple of doors (the "Terrain press"!) then cut and trimmed next morning.

It's early days so far, but from what I can see, this is a good-looking and remarkably flexible system.

Yep. That's the Karate Kid.

Each contour is about 12mm

A bit of blue cellophane and you've got a river

Terrain - Mahdist Fort

One of the 'gun ports'

 Over the weekend I finished off the first of my Mahdist forts. I see this sort of position as an artillery fort mounting a single gun and only a relatively small number of riflemen.

Something of the entrance and the decoration of the building

Construction of the small building that has been incorporated in the earthwork is foammcore. The earthwork itself is polystyrene cut with a hot wire cutter then surformed wioth a sanding block. The surface was sealed and textured with gap-filler and fine sand.

Going forth again - Into the Sudan

Outside the rain beats down, drops snaking unhurried down the pane. It has been a long and wet winter this time around.

I shudder at the sudden chill and reach for the tumbler of Glen Moray and water beside me. It warms me a little, the rich, oily aroma seems everywhere.

Can I do this again? I look to Snook for inspiration, but all I see is him cocking one at Gladstone over 130 years' distance in time and an infinity in understanding.

Featherstone then, and Barthorp. Connoisseur, Willie and a touch of Stadden where I can for the horseflesh. Yes. The old boys will do it. The old gang.

I am stirred a little. There are those old Connoisseur Highlanders in a box somewhere. I think I know where.

Like the waves, I advance a little more with each attempt.

I can do it.

Water Sports

 I've spent a little time this evening making watery terrain for some projected games here at the Duchy of Alzheim. Above is my swamp and below a picture of the full collection of ponds. Both are cur with my jigsaw from 3mm MDF before being painted. the painting was largely wet-on-wet to allow a degree of blending. the swamp/marsh/wetland was basically black with some stippling of green while the ponds pretty much speal for themselves.


Erin gets in on the act: "What you doin' daddy?"



I feel as though they sit pretty well on my table insofar as they are relatively heavy for their size and dead flat. I've chamfered the edges with a sanding block to blend them "down" to the table surface. At worst I think this only looks as artificial as the riverbank that is like a little speed-bump at the edge of a water-feature and a good deal easier to blend away with a few strategically-placed model trees to soften the transition.

It might be nice to make a great big lake.

Terrain and Undercoats

Big terrain as it is made on the exhibition circuit as I know it tends to make bulk use of polystyrene as a keleton with any number of different skins and finishes. One similarity they all seem to have is the use of a black undercoat and then sucessivly lighter coats of base colouration put on with a four-inch brush. Has anyone ever done their terrain on a white undercoat and then used progressively thinner and darker washes to get their base effects? I'm going to repaint some earthworks over the next few days as an experiment.