Corn fields

It's too hot to paint miniatures over here so time to make some terrain. 

For the American Civil War games I've got planned, corn fields are needed. I read several "how to make your own corn field" blog and forum posts. One of those used plastic plants from IKEA (Fejka:; actually this mean "fake" in Swedish. It is the fake Rosemerry plant; Thanks CommissarMoody for finding the right name). I couldn't remember where I read that so after buying two pots of Fejka, I tried to reconstruct the steps from memory.

First I cut off all the individual stalks and straightened the bent ones out by putting them in very hot water (use tweezers!). The hot water causes the plastic stalks to straighten. Then I drilled holes in strips of MDF (strips make storage easier and miniatures could be placed in the field by leaving room between 2 strips), glued the stalks in the holes and covered the MDF with woodglue and sand.

In addition to the strips of corn, I decided to make one small rectangular corn field. Just in time I realised that if I put all the stalks in, I wouldn't be able to reach the base to paint it.

All MDF parts painted.

After drybrushing with a light sand colour, I glued a bit of mixed Italian herbs between the stalks and some static grass at the edges.

Insert the remainder of the stalks and the corn field is ready for a game.

Of course I remembered the blog with the Fejka tutorial after finishing the corn field:

John Bond's corn field.

After again admiring Mr Bond's superior detailing and scratchbuilding skills, the one thing I wished I'd remembered is allowing sufficient space between the stalks for miniatures.  

And possibly to make the stalks shorter. They are now quite tall.

I can't do anything about the rectangular field, but the corn strips were designed to solve this problem.

Two Fejka plants worth of corn fields:

  

Old West Town

For our What a Cowboy campaign I needed an Old West town. I love the MDF Old West buildings from Sarissa and TT Combat, but due to space and budget restrictions I needed to find other options. 

I have found that paper buildings (e.g. from Dave Graffam) work well for me. While Dave has some buildings available that fit in an Old West town, he doesn't have things like a saloon or sherrif's office. Fortunately I found the Rio Draco set from Fat Dragon Games.

Instead of foamboard I use cheap corrugated cardboard as support for the paper. Basically the method is the same as described in my Old town post.

The cardboard house is glued to an MDF base supported by pieces of styrofoam.

Then the paper building walls are glued to the cardboard.

To maximise ease of storage I decided to leave out the boardwalk parts except for the saloon and build separate ones from popsicle sticks.

I remembered covering the side of the cardboard building walls for the bank before attaching the paper wall.

I forgot to do this for other buildings and fixed this by inserting matchsticks.

And covering the top of the front with coffee stirrer sticks.

The finished buildings in a town setting, together with Dave Graffam buildings:

Project Star Wars part 16: More ships!

You can never have enough spaceships (until you run out of storage space that is). So when I saw this thread on the Leadadventure forum, I bought the Zurg mothership.

The shape and size of the ship make it suitable for a lot of roles. It could be an Imperial ship (Moff Zurg's ship), a Zurgian Rebel Alliance ship, a Privateer ship or a ship from any faction outside of the Star Wars universe. I decided to keep the paint scheme simple so it could be used for all those purposes.

First I removed the top (it's easy to unscrew) and spraypainted it grey. The purple spines on the lower half were spraypainted black. The red tips are separate pieces which I kept in the original colour (the separate parts of the ship are pictured in the Leadadventure forum thread).

Then I drybrushed highlights on the entire ship, picked out some panels and painted them red and used a dark metal wash to fill in the panel lines. As a final step I added some black smudges and weathered the edges with dark grey paint.

Lando is from Imperial Assault (28mm).

The same Leadadventure thread has a reference to a converted Paw Patrol ship. I had come across this blog entry from Chicago Skirmish Wargames before and managed to get a cheap second hand one (figure is a 28mm Crooked Dice ghostbuster on a 25mm slottabase).

Although I admired what the Chicago Skirmish Wargamers had done to convert this ship and I did copy part of their paint scheme, I didn't trust my scratchbuilding skills enough to change the cockpit in the same way they had done.

But first I tried to remove as many paw symbols as possible. This was quite difficult because the plastic is very hard and parts of the interior are not easy to reach.

The removal of the paw patrol symbols left the floor uneven so these parts were covered with plastic material used for insect screens.

Ladders (made from bits of sprue) and other items from the bits box were added. I covered the back of the cockpit with a piece of plastic card, embellished with suitable bits.

Tie-wraps, dwarf shields, Renedra round and square bases, a WH40K hatch, mdf bits from some kit,  plastic card (especially to hide the large paw patrol symbol on the rear hatch) and several other bits were added to the outside of the ship. The cockpit got an elevated floor with two seats and some additional bits (sorry, forgot to take in progress pictures of these steps).

As with the Zurg ship I wanted to be able use this ship for any sci-fi faction in my miniature collection. So I went for a neutral grey paint scheme without any too specific markings and weathering similar to the Zurg ship. The figure in the pictures is a 28mm Imperial Assault Luke.

I cut out printed screen images I collected long ago from some long gone internet source and used these to cover the interior screens where the paw patrol symbols were scraped off.

And some more pictures:

I found painting the interior not easy since a lot of areas are difficult to reach, but I'm satisfied with the overall result. 

The ship will certainly feature in the next installment of our Escape from Aniron Star Wars campaign!