As I have now decided that my future direction is the hybrid board game/miniatures combination I wanted to find an alternative to using static grass on my bases .Of course there was a time when you barely ever saw static grass on bases, but I could not remember for the life of me how we used to do it! A bit of experimentation produced this simple mix that looks pretty good to my eyes and means the end of loose of grass left on the boards after a game. Above all I think it works better with the flat playing surface. I have made it two or three times now and it comes out the same shade, so I thought I had better record it.
The mix is simply: 1 part sand, 1 part PVA and 1 part Olive Green. It dries out leaving subtle highlights as you can see.
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| Base is a layer of fine grit/sand followed by a 'magic wash' to seal everything. I then add the grass texture as above, and once dry I over paint the 'earth' areas using Vallejo light brown German camo. Final touch is a dry brush of a light tone (I use Baccus basing kit 'midtone'. |
I updated my 'memoir '44 'blog yesterday and was looking through the tiles contained in the 'Terrain' expansion set. I noticed one stack was of desert terrain, and remembered that I do have the 13 x 17 hex 'Breakthrough' board in desert sand so I unfolded it for the first time and laid a few of a the tiles. Immediately my thoughts turned to the wonderful Peter Pig 'Colonial' range 'Sudan 1885' and another opportunity to do something fresh and new, as I have never played this period before. Like my Memoir project this offers a chance to paint small forces and really enjoy working on them. I'm sure it won't be hard to find C&C N 'variant' rules for this period, as lets face it, there's not much that has not been covered. I'll post this project up here as it progresses.
Aside from this my next post will feature the 30th Regiment of Foot (led by a wonderful Hinton Hunt officer of the Guards in bearskin, who has been unable to rejoin his regiment due to staying late at the ball). After that I have another two Spanish battalions for Tony to paint, I'm taking my time, and obviously domestic issues are taking toll of spare time, but I like to keep painting daily if I can.
*special effect of going back in time* we used to use dyed sawdust on bases. Flock it was called *fade back to present*
ReplyDelete:)
For colonial C&C there is of course Battle Cry the ACW variant which is closer in time period. In fact I saw a very nice blog where someone had done Zulu using Battle Cry (I think).
I can't find it at the moment, but there's some stuff here:
http://ccbattlecry.net/index.php?option=com_kunena&view=topic&catid=13&id=60&Itemid=167
Found it:
ReplyDeletehttp://wargamingwithbarks.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/zulu-isandlwana.html
On behalf of all the unemancipated dining-room wargamers, I'm all in favour of this move away from flock - anything which reduces the chance of scenic flock in the gravy is a good thing, I would say.
ReplyDeleteThe revised base texture certainly looks very good.
The new basing style is very attractive.
ReplyDeletere Colonials, there are numerous variants on the web. Ron and I did a Battlecry variant which is summarized here
Colonial Battlecry
Shouldn't be too hard to base a variant on Memoir instead.
Can't wait to see the 30th!
ReplyDeleteGood tip on the grass mixture...
Looks pretty good.
ReplyDelete