Ok I don't post very often around here I just lurk and enjoy all the amazing stuff other people do. Having started a new project for Darkest Africa, in the last few months, I thought I'd start a thread and share my efforts.
Recently I’ve been attempting to get a Darkest Africa project off the ground (this is my third attempt at Darkest Africa having had two attempts before that eventually just fizzled out). I love the Foundry, Copplestone and more recently North Star ranges for 19th century Africa and so determined to get some these lovely minis and build some interesting armies out of them.
Armed with my old copies of Chris Peers “In the Heart of Africa” rules and a number of books and old Wargames illustrated articles (mostly written by Chris Peers as well) I decided to plump for some armies based on the area that became the British Central Africa Protectorate and then later became Nyasaland.
At the moment I plan to do armies for the Ngoni, The North End Arabs (mostly Africans converted to Islam rather than true Arabs) who raided the local tribes for slaves and ivory and The British African Lakes Company who fought a war with the North End Arabs using a collection of local auxiliaries and European adventurers.
First up though I figured I needed some scenery to try and portray the dark continent including trying my hand at a teddy bear fur gaming mat. So my next few posts will be showing of my scenery making efforts and then hopefully onto some new miniature armies.
For my new project I decided I wanted to try out the teddy bear fur gaming mat. I’ve seen some amazing table set ups using this method and wanted to try it out for myself.
As a child growing up on Tarzan movies I probably have a very Hollywood idea of Africa. In my head its all jungles, deserts and areas of long grass all covered in more zebras, wildebeest and Chimpanzees than you can count. A quick google search however brought up a lot of pictures of areas that wouldn’t have looked out of place in rural Hampshire and brought home just how diverse the terrain is. In the end I decided to plump with my Hollywood imagination version of Africa. So first up I wanted a long grassed savannah in the dry season.
Now there are quite a few good tutorials on the net about making fur mats a quick google search will bring up plenty of useful info on how to get started.
I bought my fur off eBay a piece big enough to cover my wargames table cost me around £40. The stuff I bought was called lions mane fur in hindsight, though the golden brown colour was perfect for my purposes, the hair was very long and a shorter hair might have been better and saved me a lot of wrist ache with a pair of scissors. Anyway armed with scissors, combs and a cheap hair trimmer from Argos I set about cutting the fur at different lengths and cleared some areas back to the material backing to create a dried stream bed, track and two clearings for villages, jungle and such like. After several evenings where I started to feel more like a hairdresser than a gamer I was ready for stage two.
Stage two was to cover the cleared areas in cheap brown flexible (very important on a cloth mat) caulk purchased from Poundland and then added some grit and stones to the caulk before it dried. After painting the caulked areas I was left with this
Next up was paint the fur I used a whole load of craft and house paints in a variety of browns, greens, yellows and creams. It was a fair amount of work, over several evenings, working the paint into the fur, with a large brush, and then combing through the fur with cheap plastic combs trying to blend all the colours into each other. Once the main colours where dry it was a case of going back over and dry brushing secondary colours.
After the painting I tried to blend in the fur and caulked areas with extra static grass, grass tufts, and sponge shrubbery. After that I was left with this
I have to say for a first attempt I was pretty chuffed with how it turned out and I think it looks pretty good. in hindsight I probably should have cut the fur a bit lower to facilitate placing items on top of the mat. I deliberately made the mat a bit bigger than my gaming table so I could make raised ground and hills out of that old school method of placing some books under the mat which looks like this.
and one shot with some miniatures on the mat (and a bit of my finger..)
So having got my base mat the next job is to build some scenery to go on the mat.
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April 20, 2024, 12:06:12 AM
November 29, 2006, 09:31:04 AM