Summer Work

It's been a pretty busy summer with all of the kids' activities and vacations, however, I have managed to make progress on a few small projects. Starting with my trench project, I have continued with terrain that while primarily for WW2, I suppose much of it could serve as ACW pieces too.

I wanted to make some slender foliage pieces that could serve as tree lines for dividing land parcels or more hedgerows (as I need a lot more of these).  Here's what I've come up with in relatively short order:

These were made by cutting pieces of Sintra and simply PVAing sand to them, painting with a brown basecoat, and drybrushing with Hippo Gray. It was a Woodland Scenics and hot glue gun from there. I sprayed them down really good with WS scenic cement as well.

I also decided to add to the few WW2 ruin pieces:

I absolutely love the Dave Graffam kits. Some of these pieces are made from one of  his small ruin kits, but a few I custom made from another of his kits. The nice thing about his stuff is if you have the time and patience, they are extremely affordable, require little painting (none if you're not picky like me), obviously very light-weight, and most are customizable, so the possibilities for what you can create with a single kit are very broad.

More ruin pieces I made with Sintra bases, light talus and sand, craft sticks, and small bricks I made out of scrap pieces of foam-core:

 In a previous post I mentioned I had no intention of painting any this summer, but I got my hands on a box of Bolt Action plastic U.S. Rangers and decide to tinker a little. I think these 29th I.D. troops will fit in nicely with the 101st and 2nd Rangers I already have:

Trench Build Complete!

After about three weeks of work the trenchworks are complete and table ready. With the exception of them being a bit angular (again, I plan to make to make some additional pieces to break up the lines), I am very happy with how this project turned out. In the future instead of piecing together each section like I did, which was a lot of work, I will draw out the entire system on one or two pieces of foam and cut the individual sections after they've been glued to the Sintra and shaped.


Gluing down the shoring and planking.

Stained wood. For this I used a 10:2 mixture of black magic wash and burnt umber ink.

 Shoring and planking dry brushed with Ceramcoat Hippo Gray and flocked.

Finished!

I suppose I could use these for ACW late war stuff.