Scenery: bamboo and shrubs

Okay, here is a story of how planning ahead a little would have saved me a bit of time and a lot of annoyance. I bought some cheap plastic bamboo and shrubs from China (€ 11 on Ebay for 150 pieces) to make some terrain to go with my feudal Japan-themed scenery.

Over at Tales of@TheBrummieDwarf I found this excellent post on how to make bamboo forests, in which Oasis floral foam is used as a basing material to keep the thin and long bamboo standing upright. I didn’t feel like going out to look for foam, however. Nor did I want to order it online and wait for it to be delivered. I wanted to start building right here and right now! So what I did instead was cut out some irregular shapes out of a sheet of polystyrene and hot glue the bamboo directly to them.

Halfway though texturing and painting the bases, however, the little bamboo buggers started to come loose one by one! Admitting defeat, I ordered some 10 mm sheets of blue foam at Scenery Workshop to base the bamboo properly. The foam arrived within two working days, which is pretty amazing considering that there is a pandemic going on.

I quickly set to cutting the foam to the shape of my polystyrene bases. However, because the bases were covered in hot glue and wall filler, the foam of course wouldn’t lay flat. Not wanting to bin the old bases and cut out some new ones, I had to slowly carve, chip and sand away the remnants of my failure. Argh! In the end, though, it all turned out fine. After gluing the foam to the bases, it was a simple matter of texturing the base with wall filler, pushing in the bamboo and giving the bases a quick coat of paint and flock.

The finished pieces look pretty good, but I could have giving them a few more brown washes, because they still have a bit of that cheap neon green look to them. I also found that I needed a lot more bamboo pieces per square cm than I had expected, so I only had enough to make two bases.

Conversely, the shrubs were no problem at all. All I had to do with these was cut off the stub on the back and hot glue them to the bases. A brown wash to get rid of the cheap plastic look and then it was a matter of painting and flocking the base. Job done!

Comments

More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt. I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

Search This Blog