How to - Making Vineyards

 A staple terrain piece for every Mediterranean wargaming table must be the vineyard (alongside an olive grove, of course). This is what I am trying to replicate, though I ended up with a vineyard that was a little more established than this early season growth:

Here is how I created my version of a vineyard in 28mm with a step-by-step guide, materials and tools required. It is worth giving a nod to Pat at Wargaming with Silver Whistle who published an excellent book on creating terrain for the Mediterranean. His technique and materials are slightly different to mine, so worth checking out to compare and contrast.

Check out some of my earlier posts on my Crete terrain project for details of the specific items that I use or have purchased. I'll get round to creating a central page to reference the common items at some point.

Materials

• 3mm MDF board for the base
• Brown parcel tape
• Cuttings from a hawthorn tree
• Some matches and some bamboo skewers
• Polyfilla
• PVA glue
• Superglue
• Sand
• Tile grout
• Brown cotton
• Woodland Scenics Foliage sheets
• Some flock, clump, grass tufts etc

Tools

• Spray bottle filled with diluted PVA
• Something to cut the MDF board with. I purchased a scroll saw - see this earlier post for the details of the saw and MDF boards
• Something to sand the edges of the MDF board
• Scissors or sharp knife to cut the parcel tape with
• Drill and drill bits (optional, but makes the job so much easier)
• Old paint brush for spreading glue
• Small spatula to spread the polyfilla
• Side cutters to cut the matches and skewers

Technique

I cut the MDF board using the same materials and techniques described on my how to build walls blog. I chamfered the edges so that they blend a little better when placed on the tabletop i.e. not such square edges. The MDF boards I have got are A3 in size, so I only cut them in half to make two A4 sized bases.

Due to the size of boards, I placed several strips of brown parcel tape on the back. This tape is inflexible and limits the extent that the board warps when one side is coated with wet material such as polyfilla and PVA. It doesn't completely prevent warping, but it helps.

On the top of the boards, I marked out where I wanted to drill holes for the end posts and the supports. I decided that two end posts, with two supports in the middle, looked about right. I also left plenty of space between each set of posts to place miniatures.

To provide additional support for the end posts, I also made some additional marks where I intended to drill holes for the angled posts. To determine where holes these need to go, grab one of your matches and cut the top one-third off for the angled support piece, leaving two-thirds of the same match for the post. Hold it in place to determine how far apart the holes needs to be.

I cut a 45 degree angle into the shorter piece of the match to help it fit against the upright longer piece. The burnt bit goes into the hole in the base MDF board.

Using a drill and appropriately sized drill bit, drill all the holes. Place a waste piece of wood underneath your MDF, so that you aren't drilling into whatever is underneath! Also, with the supports for the end posts, drill the holes at a 45 degree angle to help angle the support posts more easily.

I used circular bamboo skewers cut to approx 2cm. The matches and skewers were then glued into the holes using superglue.

The angled supports posts were glued to the end posts using superglue too and then left to dry for an hour.

Once the posts have all dried in place, grab hold of some cotton thread and tie a little noose in one end, then hold the loop over one end post and then pull the "noose" closed, then wrap it around the post a couple of times.  Keep tension on the thread and then wrap it around the first skewer a few times, then wrap it a few times around the second skewer (keeping tension in the thread) before finally wrapping it around the last end post a few times.

On the final post, when you are wrapping the thread around it, you can keep the tension in the thread by wrapping the thread on top of the previous loop, go around again and wrap it on top of the thread. It is difficult to describe, but works so that you don't have to tie a knot whilst trying to maintain tension on the thread. If you do it right, you should be able to let go of the thread and it stays in place, whilst you tie knot at the end. Once each thread has been attached to all four posts, give each post a dab of superglue to hold it all in place.

Next up is the stem (stalk?) of the vine plants. I think this is where my technique differs from most other tutorials that I have seen on making vines. I love to use free materials wherever possible and right outside wargaming HQ (my shed) is a hedge of hawthorn trees (Crataegus monogyna). Hawthorn is a really tough wood and when it dries it does not become brittle like some other natural materials can do, so I think it makes for an excellent terrain-building material.

I snipped up some hawthorn twigs into lots of smaller pieces focusing on where the twig had an offshoot or two. The bigger pieces at the top of the photo below will be turned into some trees at a later date.

Get your drill and drill bits out again and size up each twig to the matching drill bit and drill a hole in the base board next to the cotton thread. Be careful not to catch the thread with your drill bit...otherwise you'll have to start again and re-thread it.

When gluing the twigs in place, stick a bit of superglue onto wherever the twig touches a post or the thread.

Some of my vine rows had three stems, some had four.

To add a bit more of a natural look, drill some of the holes at a slight angle, so that not all of your vine stems are perpendicular to the board. Nature very rarely has any straight lines or right angles!

Allow all the twigs to dry into position before starting the next step, which is to put some polyfilla down onto the board. We're looking to build up the ground level along the row of vines, but also to make the ground level less regular.

As soon as I had spread polyfilla between two rows, I sprinkled my ground covering sand mix (coloured sand and tile grout) over the wet polyfilla. I think, again, my technique differs from a number of other tutorials I have seen...no need to paint!

Cover the whole board in polyfilla and a suitably coloured sand. To my eye, a lot of the Mediterranean has a reddish coloured soil, overlaid with an almost white powdery dust. More on that later, but for now the main colour is quite reddish, though not quite as dark as it appears in the photo below - the sand was damp from the polyfilla - it dries slightly lighter in colour.

Whilst the polyfilla and sand were still wet, I took them outside and gave them a good soaking in diluted PVA glue (about 1 part PVA to 9 parts water) using a spray bottle.  This fixes everything in place and makes it really robust. This is why it is important to affix strips of non-stretchable packing tape on the back, which prevents the MDF from warping due to one side of the board being soaked and drying out again.

After spraying with diluted PVA, and still wet, I sprinkled a lighter colour ground cover (white sand and ivory tile grout) in between the rows of vines.

If your boards do bend, then, once they have dried out, you can gently flex them back to being flat before working on the next step. The keen-eyed will notice that the chamfered edges did not get any of the polyfilla and sand applied, so to rectify that I painted a little pale terracotta paint onto the edges and sprinkled more of the coloured sand onto the edges to blend them in with the rest of the base.

I used a sheet of dark green Woodland Scenics Foliage for the vine leaves. One sheet was just about enough to do 10 vines (a total of A3 sized boards).  I used dark green because it is what I had "in stock", though I wish that I had planned ahead and ordered either the light green or even medium green. I don't think the dark green is necessarily wrong because mature vines do end up that colour late in the season, but for most of the year the vine leaves are much lighter, so one of the other two WS products would probably have been more suitable.

I tore the foliage sheet up into lots of thin strips approx 1 to 2 cm wide. A lot of the (terrain) vines I have seen usually have far too much foliage on them (I think that mine do too), so less is probably more when applying the foliage.  

Do the tearing-up over a tray or piece of newspaper and save all the bits of turf that fall off. This is all the stuff that fell off!

Next was to paint neat PVA (thicker is better) onto the tops of the twigs and along the cotton thread and then carefully fold, stretch and manipulate the foliage into a vine-shaped vine. Press the foliage into the PVA a bit to ensure that it makes contact and then pull and fluff the foliage a little bit, so that it doesn't look compressed. Do this for all your vines and then leave to dry.

The reason why we want them to dry prior to the final step is that you want to shake off all the loose bits of turf before spraying the thing liberally with diluted PVA to fix all the foliage in place. Here are my sprayed vines drying in the Welsh sunshine.

And here is what they look like with a couple of Allied soldiers hunting Fallschirmjager:

I might go back to them at a later date and apply some lighter coloured turf as highlights to make them a less dark green in colour.