Home made scenery

Aside from the figures, simply buying everything for gaming can get very expensive. Model making should be about making things, so a wargames table is a dream to a Womble like me. I see potential in everyday objects, which can with a little imagination become scenery. Okay, buying scenery means you can get ultra realistic, perfectly scaled and immaculately detailed buildings, trees, walls, etc, etc, but where is the joy? I love the challenge of turning rubbish into buildings, or collecting lichen and moss to make trees and hedges. Old roofing felt cut into any wiggly shapes you want serves very well for tarmac roads.

Some Volksgrenadiers with home made trees. Real bits of branch with blobs of lichen glued on. En masse on the table they look pretty good. The section of wall is made from DAS clay, of which I have a large block open at the moment, so I'm working on a longer stretch of wall. Theoretically there will also be a house with interchangeable ruined bits. 

Some of those DAS clay wall sections.

I had lots of little unused 40x20mm figure bases kicking about in a box, which I put to use as bases for the walls. Just a little bit of work involved, sticking them together and adding some groundwork.

Then you get this, below. If you're thinking it looks a bit wobbly, it's just the camera distortion, and also it is really just a bit wobbly. The individual sections just link together. There will be some destroyed sections too for troops to pour through, or Stugs to sit in, obviously.

Scouring pads are wonderful things, especially for washing dishes, but when they get worn out you can make them into hedges! Convincing hedges? Well, convincing enough for a US paratrooper to hide behind. I pluck them out a bit and paint them up. If you want to spend the time I suppose they could be textured with different colours of scatter, but as a representation of the Normandy bocage I think it's okay. If you screw your eyes up.

Look out Spongebob, or as they say in Normandy, Bob l'eponge!

My youngest daughter is a crafty type, and if I ever get to the stage of playing a game she will be be my opposite number. She gets involved making the trees and little dugouts, and will be in charge of an Airfix Typhoon for air strikes at some point down the line.

Here is some of her handiwork, an Airfix Zero. (the canopy being the only part I helped her with) and below, felted fire and smoke markers!
Not bad for one who, at the time of writing, is only 11 years old.

Shmoke and a pancake!

Continuing with the scenery from junk theme I had some off cuts of insulating board in the shed, thick enough to keep a very small house super cosy, or ideal to make some low rent hills with. My daughter and I got to work with the kitchen knives and spent a couple of hours making a right old mess in the garden.

Sheds are great because there is so much stuff in them that you had forgotten about, like this tin of aerosol stone effect paint. The colour is a bit light but it was the texture I wanted, it's rough and sandy, giving a great base to start from. Darker browns will be sprayed over this and then the usual static grass, rocks and scatter added.

I got some brown spray paint for a base colour, and I think it looks okay. The process of dressing it is next; rocks, grass, scatter and so on. Maybe a rocky escarpment made from flakes of slate pushed into the material. The tops of the two smaller hills are relatively flat, so trees should perch nicely. The bigger hill has a nice flat top, so it is going to take a house.

My daughter was busy again today on the hills. She collected some scraps of slate together, and broke them up to make a rocky, outcroppy, cliff face thingy. Good work!