Terrain Building

So it's not all painting figures. There's other boring but necessary parts of wargaming and now we come to that sort of work...

First up, barricades.

They're resin castings that have been lying about half-painted in a drawer for ages. I stripped the half-paint off them and re-did them. There were a couple of casting flaws which I thought about filling and then decided to model as splits in the bags -- a scattering of fine ballast in the hole and around the sacks completed that look. I wish I could tell you who made them, but I honestly can't remember.

Next up is the reason I've been painting so slowly recently... bocage hedgerows. I've been making these for ages and I'd finally got to the stage of making the trees. Wow, that's a fiddly job. Woodland Scenics actual glue which they suggest for this purpose is rubbish. I tried a couple of "tacky glue" variants bought from hobbycraft and while they might glue glitter onto cards, foliage onto trees they don't.

In the end, copydex -- proper, gunky, smelling-of-fish copydex -- turned out to be the Right Approach.

And patience. Doing a small area on each tree and then leaving them to dry means less of the "every time you add a clump another one falls off" frustration. The finished bits look like this;

The base is a length of wood moulding, triangular in cross-section. Over this, wood filler for the "mud". The bushes are loops of wire hot-glued onto the moulding. "Rubberised horsehair" (apparently it's mostly pig bristles these days) hotglued in sections onto the wire loops gives the underlying structure. They're finished by a layer of white glue and a scattering of Noch leaves.

Mostly these are about 11 inches long (to fit on a 12x12 field grid allowing for the corners), but some are shorter both to edge roads and also leave gate gaps. I've also done a set of lower hedges and some tree clusters.