Lots of new terrain: Dutch farm, trees, fences and craters

Well, that escalated quickly! Sometime back in August, I decided to buy a handful of minis for each of the four countries featured in the book ‘Hitler's Blitzkrieg Enemies 1940: Denmark, Norway, Netherlands & Belgium’. Less than two months later, I now have a completed 500 pt. Dutch army for Bolt Action and components to build Belgian and German armies of similar size!

Those armies need some terrain to fight over, so I also bought this MDF kit from Sarissa Precision. I think it captures the look of a Dutch farm pretty well. The only thing I didn’t like was the look of the tiled roof, so I used an old towel to represent thatching. The towel required a lot of glue to stick it down, because the towel and MDF both kept soaking up the thinned down wood glue. With some perseverance, though, I think I got a pretty convincing result. The pattern on the window shutters was a lot of fun to paint and is based on designs common in my area.

Every farm needs fencing, so I made a bunch of fences from some wooden coffee stirrers. I designed them to be about chest height for your average 28 mm scale mini. The fences were hot glued to 2 mm thick plasticard, which was then textured with used coffee grounds, painted brown and flocked.

I also had these cheap model rail road trees laying about. I didn’t really do anything to the trees apart from hot gluing them to some washers (size M10) and then texturing, painting and flocking the bases.

Finally, I also made some craters. The craters are based on 2mm plasticard and the lips of the craters are made of DAS air drying clay. Top tip: DAS clay does not like to stick to plastic, so add a little bit of wood- or PVA glue to your base (you don’t need a lot) before you start sculpting. This should stop the clay from sliding about when you are working. After letting the clay cure overnight, I again textured the bases with used coffee grounds, painted them and applied my flock.

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