How to - making bamboo groves

Is it a grove of bamboo, or a stand, or a clump? Whatever it is, this is what I was trying to model:

The photos are courtesy of Google Street View, the first one is in Chania and the second, Perivolia, both on the island of Crete. (Spot the agave cactus in the first shot - see my how to guide for making those).

A search on Amazon turned up some useful-looking plastic plants. There are 100 pieces in four different sizes for under a tenner, so great value. The downside is that they are plastic and bright green, so need a bit of work, but that is sort of the object of my blog. ;-)

I made lots of small bases using offcuts of 2mm MDF that came with tree bases from 4Ground.  Once you have popped out the tree bases from the rectangular piece of MDF, you are left with the "waste".  

I used some small (and very sharp and very strong) gardening pruning snips to cut the MDF into some interesting and non-regular shapes.  Then I drilled some holes using a 2mm drill bit so that I could poke the stalk of the plastic plants into them, once the bases had been prepared.

Before inserting the plants into the base, I roughly coated them in a thin-ish layer of generic polyfilla and immediately dipped them into my Mediterranean basing sand. The example below shows a couple of larger stones stuck into the polyfilla prior to applying the sand. You can just about make out some of holes on the right.

This is what they look like immediately after dipping. The polyfilla does not hold the sand particularly well, but allows enough to stick on until it gets sealed with diluted PVA glue, applied using a spray bottle.

Here are several bases drying in the garden after a liberal coating of diluted PVA. All of the bases below came from the offcuts of a single 4Ground large tree base.  They need a couple of hours to make sure that they are fully dry before moving to the next step.  Once fully dried, I painted the exposed edges of the bases with a pale terracotta paint, dipped in sand and re-sealed. It is worth the extra effort of spraying a couple of times; they are bullet-proof afterwards and will stand up to a lot of handling on the gaming table. 

Whilst they are drying, you can get on with covering over the green plastic plants with a more suitable colour. I started off using a spray paint from Army Painter (do they actually put any pigment into their spray cans?) and then started over after buying some good quality spray paints from Humbrol. I used three colours from their acrylic range: Desert Tan, Beige Green and Desert Yellow. Be aware that the actual colours look nothing like the coloured labels on the lids. The Humbrol paint is far superior to any other spray paints that I have used. My only small criticism is that they took 10 days to fulfil my order.

After a bit of experimentation, I found that a good all-over base colour was the Desert Tan, followed by a light dusting of Beige Green and then a very light dusting of Desert Yellow. There is tons of pigment in the Humbrol cans, so you hardly need to spray anything to get a good covering.  Less is certainly more in this case.

I used a small offcut of insulation foam and poked a load of holes in it to create a temporary base to stand each plant in whilst spraying. The photo above shows the base colour of Desert Tan.  The photo below shows the second coat (Beige Green), which is a very pale, minty green colour.

To finish them off, a really quick squirt of Desert Yellow created some highlights. The spray paint dries in less than minute, so this step is really quick.

Each plant was then poked through the pre-drilled hole in the base - you may need to re-drill a couple from the underside of the base if you have inadvertently filled in a hole.  Do this before you start poking the stems into the holes.

Poke the plants into all the pre-drilled holes and then apply a little dab of superglue from the underside to hold them in place.  Once the superglue has dried, I used some side-cutters to snip off the excess length of the plant from the underside of the base so that they sit flush on the table top.

This is what they look like on the gaming table.

Howto - making agave cactus plants

The agave cactus (Agave americana) originated in the Americas, but was transported to the Mediterranean in the 16th century and is now commonplace across the region.  I remember these plants from my childhood living in Cyprus, so wanted to create some for my terrain table. I did the usual: trawling through Amazon to try and find suitable plastic plants, but could not find anything. I then started making some out of different materials such as paper, card, plasticard, but none of them really worked out.

This image came from Marc Ryckaert at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7209445 and is a great example of agave cacti.

A recent visit back to Amazon turned up these beauties.  At £4.99 (including delivery) for 50 pieces, they are an absolute bargain and really look like agave cacti. My only gripe is that they are plastic and bright green, but that can be rectified on the painting table.

One thing that I learnt when browsing through Amazon recently is that it seems as though Chinese manufacturers or vendors will sell an identical product under different brand names but at wildly different prices. The most striking example that I can find is when searching for "static grass applicator". There are dozens of items for sale, most of which look identical (many use the same photograph to advertise the product) starting from as low as £18, running all the way up to £38!

Anyway, back to the cacti. I made lots of small bases using offcuts of 2mm MDF that came with tree bases from 4Ground.  Once you have popped out the tree bases from the rectangular piece of MDF, you are left with the "waste".  Very little actually goes into the bin in my wargaming shed - most things can be recycled in some capacity to make something useful for the gaming table.

I used some small (and very sharp and very strong) gardening pruning snips to cut the MDF into some interesting and non-regular shapes.  Then I drilled some holes using a 2mm drill bit so that I could poke the stalk of a cactus plant into it.

Before inserting the plants into the base, I roughly coated them in a thin-ish layer of generic polyfilla and immediately dipped them into my Mediterranean basing sand. The example below shows a couple of larger stones stuck into the polyfilla prior to applying the sand.

This is what they look like immediately after dipping. The polyfilla does not hold the sand particular well, but allows enough to stick on until it gets sealed with diluted PVA glue, applied using a spray bottle.

Drying in the garden after a liberal coating of diluted PVA. All of the bases below came from the offcuts of a single 4Ground large tree base.  That's what I call value-for-money! 

Once fully dried, I painted the exposed edges of the bases with a pale terracotta paint, dipped in sand and re-sealed. It is worth the extra effort of spraying a couple of times; they are bullet-proof afterwards and will stand up to a lot of handling on the gaming table. Whilst the bases were drying, I used an old can of Plastic Soldier Company (colour: WW2 Armour) spray paint to prime the bright green plastic plants, then left to dry and got on with some other jobs.

After the base coat of spray paint had dried, I painted on some Wall Green base paint from 4Ground (I don't think they sell it anymore, so any pale, mint green coloured paint from a DIY shop should suffice) onto the plants. I dry-brushed a highlight of Vallejo Dark Sand onto some of the leaves so that they weren't a uniform colour. They look darker than they actually are in this photo.

The plants were then pushed into the pre-drilled holes in one of the bases with a tiny bit of superglue applied to the hole. I have pushed these three plants through by different amounts to create some shorter and some taller cacti, then snipped off the excess using side cutters so that they are flush with the bottom of the MDF base.

I think that I will probably apply a little bit of additional flock and clump material just to finish off the base, but I think that these have turned out OK.

Howto - building a terraced hillside for the Mediterranean

I posted up some reference photos a few days ago as inspiration for a terrain piece that I had had in my mind for quite a while now: a terraced hillside.  

Hills (badly done!) on a wargaming table have long been a pet peeve of mine. Many tabletop terrain slopes are either too steep to perch a miniature on or just look unrealistic.  Building well-proportioned hill terrain, but still suitable for gaming on, is one of the trickiest things to pull off, IMHO. I think that I have discovered the solution...terraced hills!

Terraced hills have been employed by farmers all around the world through the ages, but are common in many parts of the Mediterranean as way of turning unusable land into being suitable for agriculture. The steepest hills, with terraces cut into them and buttressed with retaining walls, become productive land for vines, fruit trees or other crops. It also means that you can place minis on the hillsides without them falling off/down and they look real. You be the judge!

Materials

• High density roofing insulation board (or something similar)
• Cheap polyfilla or similar; I bought a big bucket of super cheap, low quality wall filler
• PVA glue
• Cat litter
• Paint for the stone walls; I used some small pots that 4Ground used to produce, but any sort of acrylic or DIY-store paint will probably suffice
• Sand
• Coloured tile grout
• Flock, clump, scatter,  etc

Tools

• A large saw
• A spatula or something to spread the wall filler
• A spray bottle
• Paint brush

Technique

I cheated slightly at the start of this project by recycling a large hill from my winter table (you can see it in photos of this battle report) and used that as the base for the whole terrain piece. 

If I hadn't up-cycled the foam hill, I would have started off with a block a bit like the bit below, which is approximately four inches thick. I peeled off the silver foil and then cut it into a rough oval shape (the outline of the hill) using my wood saw.  Wear some gloves and a mask if you are cutting this stuff up - it's not the sort of dust that you want to ingest or inhale.

Then, I cut chunks of the square edges off using the full length of the saw cutting into the foam starting off at a 45 degree angle, then a shallow angle, then shallower again. The idea is that you cut the squareness off the block and create shallow slopes from the base up to the peak.  You should be able to see what I mean by looking at the green parts of the hill in the photo below i.e. before I started cutting the terraces into it.

Using the saw again, I cut into the hillside, level with the base, to create the "floor" of the terraces, then cut downwards to create the "walls" of each terrace.

I sealed all the bare foam with the cheap wall filler and left it to dry for a few hours.

Don't be too concerned about making it look that tidy. It gets completely covered in other materials later on.

One thing that I learnt during this project is that cheap, low quality wall filler shrinks when it dries, which caused the foam insulation to warp. Who knew? ;-(  I think I will go back and rebase the whole terrain piece on something that has a nice, flat base.

The next step is to apply the walls, which are made of cat litter and plenty of PVA glue. I have written a separate tutorial on how I create my rough-looking Mediterranean stone walls, so I won't repeat the how-to here.  Here are some photos of the work-in-progress though.

Once the walls have dried (lots of diluted PVA), then the base coat of paint went onto the walls and it was left to dry.

Before painting any more of the walls (mid coat, top coat and highlights), I applied lots of PVA glue to the surfaces that were not walls and liberally sprinkled a mixture of sand and tile grout to create a realistic looking ground covering. The white in the photo below is PVA glue.

The sand I used was a blend of yellow sharp sand from a builder's merchant, mixed with a very red sand (I cannot remember where it came from, but it is excellent material for making Mediterranean soil), mixed with a little ivory coloured powdered tile grout. 

I covered the whole hillside in this base "soil", then tipped off the excess onto a sheet of newspaper, then put it out to dry for a bit.

This is the tile grout. This 2.5kg bag cost about £7 to £8 from B&Q.

Whilst the base sand was still wet, I sprinkled, dropped and threw pinches of white tile grout onto the damp surface. The "throwing" of the tile grout creates little mounds and piles, which simulates rocky outcrops poking through the soil. Once I was happy that I had created enough rocky bits, I sprayed the whole thing in diluted PVA using a spray bottle.  This is what the whole thing looked like with the reddish base and then lots of little patches of white tile grout.

It looks a lot whiter in these two photos (above and below) because it is not yet wet with the diluted PVA sealant and the areas that only had a light dusting of white look a lot whiter than they end up being.  You can see the little "rocks" of tile grout in the photo below prior to it being sprayed and sealed.

When wet with the PVA, this is what it looked like...not quite so white. After spraying, leave to dry completely.

Once it had dried, I applied a thin dusting of both the red coloured sand and also some more white tile grout. The red sand was lightly dusted over most of the hillside again and then a track was marked out using more white tile grout.  The effect of adding a light dusting of red sand, once wetted with the diluted PVA, was the red "soil" sits in the crevices of the tile grout "rocks" and creates a really nice realistic effect.  Adding the white tile grout to create a farm track at the same time meant that I could balance the two colours against each other to achieve the effect I wanted.

Again, after applying the sand and tile grout, it was sealed with diluted PVA glue from a spray bottle and left to dry. With only light dustings of both colours, I didn't need to apply quite so much PVA on this coat, so drying time in the sun was pretty quick.  You should be able to see in the photo below the edges of the terraces, where they sit atop the wall; I piled up a little extra red sand so that the terrace overlapped the top of the wall.

And that completes the basic build. Onto the decoration. Before applying any flock or scatter material, I painted the next few coats onto the walls to finish them off.  A detailed tutorial on how I made the walls is described in another blog post, but the basics were:

1. Mid grey colour "wet-brushed" on; leave to dry
2. Whitish colour dry-brushed very lightly onto the upper half of the wall; leave to dry
3. Pale terracotta dry-brushed a little more heavily across the whole wall to make it look a bit sandier and to blend all the colours together

Once the walls had been done, I started on the really fun part: growing some vegetation. I have used a real mixture of all sorts of material, most of which comes from Woodland Scenics. I referred back to my reference photos for some inspiration on how the vegetation spilled over the walls and in between the stones.

Here is what it looks like finished off and ready for the gaming table.

The larger bushes were created using some fibres from a coconut liner for a planter, dipped in neat PVA, then dipped into flock/scatter/clump, left to dry and then stuck into place.  There is a better description of the tools, materials and technique on this earlier blog post.

Next up, I think, will be to revisit the tree-making and create some more trees on individual bases, which can be placed along the terraces.