Diablo Jon does Darkest Africa - now with A DitDc AAR

[fred]

Great looking jungle - the low level shots are particularly good.

It can take a lot of looking to find aquarium plants with small leaves - but they are out there

[Sunjester]

Absolutely brilliant, well done!

[Mike1879]

That’s looking really good. This is going to be a really interesting project to follow. Well done.

[Hammers]

Very nice!

[Smokeyrone]

Beautiful!

[Diablo Jon]

Thanks for the feedback guys appreciate it.

Kopjes are another of those bits of scenery that seem quintessentially African. So naturally I wanted one. First off a quick google images search for Kopjes showed me a range of rocky features ranging from a few rocks sticking out of the ground to things that looked like small mountains but all of them had lots of rocks and quite a bit of vegetation.

Now my original idea had been to create hills by placing books under my games mat and I think that still works for gentle rolling hills but for a Kopje I felt I need to build a special piece of scenery. So I had a look in my scenery building boxes (a couple of big plastic boxes where I store stuff ..ok junk that I think might be used for scenery building) and sourced a piece of pink foam, some pieces of bark and an off cut from my teddy bear fur mat.

I carved the pink foam into a rough steep hill and hot glue gunned it to a hardboard base. Then I attached the bark pieces to the pink foam with a glue gun and cut and stuck the teddy bear fur over the areas of pink foam not covered in bark pieces. Next up was filling the gaps in the bark pieces  and then liberally adding stones, gravel, sand and PVA. Once that was dry I trimmed the teddy fur and created a path to the top of the kopje which was then filled with brown window filler caulk with stones and gravel pressed into it. The whole lot was painted to match my gaming mat and I finished it off by adding extra foliage and grass tufts.

I had a few bits of pink foam left over so I built a few free standing rocks as scatter terrain to go with my kopje.

What I end with was this

[FlyXwire]

The rock outcrops set most seamlessly into your mat - everything looks so good!

[Diablo Jon]

The rock outcrops set most seamlessly into your mat - everything looks so good!

Thanks.

 It was something I didn't appreciate when I set out to do a teddy fur mat that the long grass effect would help to hide the bases on my scatter scenery quite well, so they look a bit more natural, because the kopje has fur on it at well I could use a standard hair comb to blend the two together to hide the base. I have a couple of ideas for some bigger scenery pieces like the Kopje and will certainly edge there base boards in fur off cuts in the future.

[Diablo Jon]

Elephant, Napier or Uganda grass is a feature in many places in Africa. Chris Peers mentions it numerous times in his African books so naturally I needed some for my African wargames scenery. So after a bit of research I discovered there are several plants, around the world, who use the common name elephant grass (not that unusual in horticulture) but the African version is Pennisetum purpureum.

So a quick google images search found lots of images of Pennisetum purpureum

https://uk.images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrJS9I2Kv9dzGkAhDcM34lQ;_ylu=X3oDMTE2dDFjdTIxBGNvbG8DaXIyBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDVUlVS0MwMV8xBHNlYwNwaXZz?p=elephant+grass+africa&fr2=piv-web&fr=mcafee

Then as I always do I googled to see what other gamers have done I found a few examples using aquarium grass, broom bristles, artificial lawn grass and various fake model grasses none of them quite captured the look of the elephant grass images I was seeing.

So I decided to try a test piece using my own ideas. I won’t go into the build details yet I’ll just show a couple of pictures of what I came up with











I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I need to build several more clumps now which could take a while as it isn’t a quick process. Though I have learnt a few lessons, with this test piece, that should help speed things up like the glue gun is your friend and PVA is a pain in the rear.

[Mike1879]

They look superb fair play !! Looking forward to seeing how you built them. Excellent !!!

[Smokeyrone]

uh, did you test to make sure figures stand up on the fur?

 

[Digits]

They look very cool.  I’m intrigued as to how you made it.

Also, I’m hoping you will be scratch making yourself termite mounds?

[Diablo Jon]

uh, did you test to make sure figures stand up on the fur?

 

they seem to if you look through the photos you will see minis stood in the fur 

[Diablo Jon]

They look very cool.  I’m intrigued as to how you made it.

Also, I’m hoping you will be scratch making yourself termite mounds?

Hadn't really looked at termite mounds before, they look interesting, my first thought was they look like the sort of shapes you get with that expanding foam you get in a can ..might be worth a play. the more obvious solution is carving pink foam maybe with a heat source rather than knife. Something to add to my list.

[FifteensAway]

Love what you are doing and I was a bit surprised at your elephant grass - at first glance I thought it looked like very nicely modeled bamboo.  A real challenge to recreate that 'flimsy' lower grass and get the greener ends at the top.  I guess it is the thickness of your lower grass parts - awfully sturdy looking.  Some of the photos at the links reminded me very much of sugar cane.  I do like how you've kept a very nice color theme throughout your terrain building.  Maybe your elephant grass can do double duty as bamboo?