Wirelizard's Perpetual Terrain Thread (4 June 2011 - plowed fields, WiP photo)

[anevilgiraffe]

River dock basically done, barring some drybrushing on the muddy bits.


The larger dock is glued down; the other bits are freestanding for some flexibility.

right.... started nicking your idea....

did you individually plank the jetty? may need to track down some thinner balsa I think... mine looks a bit too thick

[Wirelizard]

right.... started nicking your idea....

did you individually plank the jetty? may need to track down some thinner balsa I think... mine looks a bit too thick

All the jetty bits are individually planked; the basswood I used is about 1/16th thick and 3/16th wide. Try to find basswood if you can, not balse; basswood is cleaner and stronger (balsa tends to be "fuzzy").

The underpinnings are various larger bits of basswood, or for the round beams & pilings, bamboo BBQ skewers or just toothpicks.

I used coarse sandpaper and the teeth of a razor saw (put the razor saw across the wood, drag it up and down sideways) to rough up the planks and pilings, and a couple washes mostly of grey ink (with a bit of brown) to give a decent weathered wood appearance. I scuffed with sandpaper between washes, too, for the current blotchy look.

[anevilgiraffe]

hmmm... never used basswood before... may give that a go... cheers

[Photographer]

Very nicely done! Love the small details like the shore waves.

[Wirelizard]

Very nicely done! Love the small details like the shore waves.

Any shore waves you see are happy accidents of paint and gloss medium, not deliberate!  (I'll take credit for accidental detail, of course, but I'm also cursed with honesty...)

While greenstuffing the rope ladder for my air pirates, I fiddled some excess GS into a couple of flags.

Couple of bigger banners to reserve for future projects, one "regular size" one that'll probably become a Union Jack (am I mad enough to attempt a freehand Union Jack? Not sure, actually...), one small pennant that'll likely become decoration for boats.

I squeezed, stretched and fiddled the GS into roughly the shape I wanted, cleaned up the edges with an xacto blade, then wrapped it around a piece of steel wire and smoothed the joins down with a damp fingertip and a few hand-carved sculpting tools. (surprisingly versatile things, toothpicks...) More excess GS went into knobs and some cordage on some of the flags.

GS stretched this thin dries surprisingly flexible, to the point where I might be able to flatten these flags out again gently to make painting them easier.

Another grainy late-night handheld photo, I know. I need to do a daylight photo session some non-rainy day this coming week... too much new stuff unphotographed!

[anevilgiraffe]

Union flag old chap... only a jack on a ship 

[Wirelizard]

Union flag old chap... only a jack on a ship 

I knew that, actually, being a bit of a flag geek, but when you say "Union flag" most Brits I've ever met say "You mean the Union jack?" so I went with the popular if inexact usage. 

Regardless of the actual name, freehanding two (one on each side of the flag...) might be a bit much. We shall see.

[Wirelizard]

You will, of course, remember this hill, from long-ago times when this thread was young:



Staring at it a few days ago, I realized that if you put the two halves next to each other on the same table edge, with the cliff faces in the lower photo parallel, you got a very respectable ravine or canyon entrance. Now, what does a dangerous canyon really need, for proper pulp insanity?

An insanely fragile, dangerous bridge, of course! Just the thing to go carreering across in an out-of-control Model T whilst being chased by a maddened T. Rex!  



It'll probably get a few more beams along it; even for an insanely fragile bridge it looks a bit TOO lightly constructed right now; I also need to rough up and weather the whole thing. The ends are going to be embedded in the same caulking I've been making roads out of lately.

Pulp Figures 28mm Russian renegades for scale, with figure cases standing in for the actual cliffs for now!

[Wirelizard]

Added more beams to the underside of the bridge, bits along the edges of the deck, and wear, tear and weathering along the deck and elsewhere.

Quick photo:



Later this evening I'll get the caulking gun out and do the two small road pieces that'll hide the beams coming onto land and blend the whole thing in with the roads I've been making.

Not a bad two-day project!

[anevilgiraffe]

missed that bridge... looks great...

finally got round to finishing nicking your coastal bit...

http://anevilgiraffe.blogspot.com/2011/05/river-wip.html

[Wirelizard]

finally got round to finishing nicking your coastal bit...

http://anevilgiraffe.blogspot.com/2011/05/river-wip.html

Those look great, EG. The cork tile for banks give them more texture than my card banks have.

[Wirelizard]

Started my first new terrain project in far too long a few evenings ago - a batch of plowed fields, good generic scenery for everything from 16th C TYW/ECW battlefields to all sorts of pulpish places and times.

There's 4 roughly 6"x4" fields and one larger 8"x6" field.

I took a sheet of corrugated cardboard and while watching a movie several evenings ago, carefully peeled off the top layer of paper and cleaned most of the ragged bits off the now-exposed corrugations. The boxes Warlord plastic ECW figures come in and an old shoebox donated thin cardboard for bases, and I glued everything together the stacked some big books and a six-pack of Coke on top to keep everything flat while they dried.

Next came my usual sand and fine gravel mix, over most of each field and thicker around the edges. I wound up doing two layers of this, as the first looked too skimpy.

Tonight I got the base coats done. I mixed the paint right on each field, squirts of brown and burnt umber craft paint with a bit of black paint and a generous squirt of white glue as well. (My basecoat layers for almost all my scenery is a white glue/paint mix, it seals and toughens things nicely) I used a 1.5" housepainting brush to shove the paint around, mixing right on each piece, and moving the various rough-mixed batches of paint back and forth so all five fields have roughly the same mixed colour on them.

Between wet paint and late-night light, this isn't a great  photo, but you can see the basic structure and painting on two of the smaller 6x4 fields:


There's a bit of warping of most of the fields, but some more paint on the backs will help somewhat with that, then once they're done I'll park them under a heavy book for a while, then store them somewhere they can't (hopefully) curl again. Considering they're cheap light card and corrugated cardboard, I'm pleased with how little warping there is, and the overall appearance so far is just fine. You can still see the edges of the corrugated cardboard pieces in a few cases, but flock around the edges will fix that.

Tomorrow night I'll do a quick drybrush across the plowed marks and sand, then start on the flock. They should be done by mid-week... pity I have zero actual gaming time between now and the end of the month!

[anevilgiraffe]

would a book not crush your corrugations?

not as cheap, but corrugated plasticard on a plasticard base would be less prone to warping...

[FramFramson]

I made some very similar fields a while back and had warping issues. I tried it with a non permeable plastic base too, but it turned out the issue was the shrinking of the cardboard after it received heavy treatment to make it look like a dirt field.

Corrugated plastic might be just the ticket.

[Wirelizard]

would a book not crush your corrugations?

Nope. These fields have already been weighted down once, when I glued the two layers of cardboard together, with no noticeable damage to the corrugations, and now that they're covered in a heavy layer of white glue and paint (my primer coat for scenery is 1:1 white glue and paint) they're so solid I can't even do much damage with my thumb, never mind more distributed weight!

not as cheap, but corrugated plasticard on a plasticard base would be less prone to warping...

True, but that would negate two of the attractions of this project: working with found material diverted from the recycling bin, and the fact that total money spent so far on this project = zero!

I painted the backs of the fields last night, and that cured most of the warping. Today they're under weights for the day, so that should fix the rest. Final paint and flock tonight.