Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

As mentioned here  I've started to use an artificial turf mat as a terrain mat for games. As bought the mat was 100cm by 200cm which is far too big for our tiny dining table.  I cut it down to two pieces of 100cm x 80cm (80cm being the width of the table ) and 100cm x 120cm.  I'm undecided as to whether to cut the second piece to size at the moment.   It already had some variance in the greens and a bit of texture but nowhere near enough. Over the August Bank Holiday weekend I spent a couple of hours working on the smaller piece with some cheap acrylic craft paints and some hobby acrylic trying to get an effect suitable for jungle games. It's better but I think still needs work.  It'll do for the moment as I want to play a game but I can see me coming back to it when I get some inspiration.  I'm trying to decide what to do for the larger piece.  I really need something for more arid  places, specifically for Italy/Spain and for the ...

I'm catching up with updates as things have been very busy work wise. Here's the last batch of jungle scatter bases that I completed Bank Holiday weekend. I already had the bases prepared as I'd done these in the first batch . I followed the same methods for these.  That now gives me about 30 scatter bases which with palm and other trees is enough for a game of Bolt Action French Indo-China War in 20mm or Burma or Pacific WW2 in 15mm. I only have a small table so these should be enough to fill it. If not I have plenty of materials left to make some more although I'd rather not as I may have a touch of jungle fever now.

These trees are made by Pegasus Hobbies bought many years ago. I painted the leaves and trunks and that was about it.  I'm in "jungle terrain build mode" so these were next for improvement.  As well as the objective of making the trees look better, the integral bases weren't that large or stable so they needed work.  I cut some larger bases from a 1.5mm plastic sheet I had lying about. The plastic card and the undersides of the trees were scored repeatedly with an old craft blade to improve the bond and then PVA'd to each other.   After a suitable drying time of a couple of hours I added household filler to the bases.  These were left to dry overnight.  If I'd have got to this stage earlier in the day they'd have been ready to work on after a couple of hours as the filler dries quickly enough.   Next day I added the ground texture mix of mixed sand, sawdust, unused dry tea leaves and scatter material that I used for the  scatter terrain ...

After completing a batch of new scatter terrain bases for jungle games , I decided to redo the original batch. the original bases These had been painted with a green base coat and comparing them to the new batch they didn't look as good.  First stage was to mix up a nice dark brown which I applied more as a wash across the bases trying to avoid the patches of flock, static grass and lichen. After drying VMC US Field Drab was then drybrushed over the top. This improved them greatly tieing them in with the new batch.  To finish off I just added a few patches of self adhesive grass and bushes to the bases that I felt needed a bit more interest. And here's both the new and refurbished old batch all boxed together. Palm trees next.

There's only one rule for terrain and that's you can never have too much.  This was very much the case when I revisited my box of jungle terrain in preparation for some French Indo-China War games that I'm planning.  I didn't have anywhere near enough for a good looking game. These were made years ago for a 15mm game of Legends of the High Seas set on a desert island.  They've not had much use but I remember spending an enjoyable afternoon making them.  I used them as templates for this new batch. The bases were cut from corrugated card and the undersides painted with cheap acrylic paint to help against warping. I used cheap household filler to fill the gaps at the edges that resulted from when I cut them out and slightly bevelled them. They were then covered in PVA and dipped in a mix of sawdust, sand and Javis urban scatter.  This gave a nice mixed texture to work over. All the bases were then painted a dark brown mixed from burnt umber acrylic craft paint wit...

This week I've been working on a pack of Battlefront French Foreign Legion sappers which aremy oldest outstanding figures.  I'd bought them at a knockdown price from eBay back in 2019 without a clear idea of what I was going to do with them and they'd sat in a box since.  I'm a bit of a sucker for La Légion. Why do them now?  Purely for lack of any other figures to do! With these finished I have nine, yes nine outstanding figures.  Actually I have 96 others but I'm probably going to be selling these off as I've re-evaluated doing that project. Anyway back to the FFL sappers.  These are my last pack of BF figures and are metal, I don't think they do any metal anymore.  I have hundreds of metal BF figures for various theatres and nations of WW2.  Funnily enough, I've never played Flames of War although I have a fair few of the books.  I use the figures for Bolt Action which I think they work very well for.   I decided to do them ...

As a change from working on wargames bits I've spent time over the last month building the Airfix 1/72nd Boulton Paul Defiant kit. This is the third Airfix aircraft I've built since the end of 2019. I started with the Hurricane , straightaway moved onto the Spitfire and then after a year's gap did the Defiant. Each kit was easier and more enjoyable to make, due to my skills and experience improving with each build but also each one was actually a better kit. The Hurricane needed quite a bit of filling and fiddling about during assembly, whereas the Spitfire and the Defiant especially were a joy to make.