This Blue and Pleasant Land

All of these trees set me back by a dollar.  That's one dollar for the whole lot.  Don't you just love wargamer swap meets.  Shame they only happen twice a year around these parts.

Normally, these are glued together to form four tall trees suitable for 28mm figures.  What you see represents a portion of a single sprue of plastic trees that I think were included in the 5th Edition Warhammer 40k box set.  The tallest three trees use the three bases left on that sprue, the rest are glued directly on to washers that had the holes filled in with cardboard hole punches.  Quick and dirty - that's my style.

The two dark green trees will go into the hydroponics level of The Big Ship, and were painted to match the rest of the earthborn trees therein.  The rest of the trees have a bluish tinge to give them a more alien-planet feel, and they'll be used as scatter cover in my urban terrain set-up.

As you can see, this foliage fills up a smaller building, leaving plenty of room for more scatter cover in the other buildings.  At the rate this is filling up, we might just run out of steam on the project before we run out of room in the box.

Another Reason I Don't Play 40k...

That bastard Nurgle just won't leave me alone, and the Emperor doesn't seem to be doing squat to protect me.  Three weekends in a row I've been laid low by some dumb cold or flu or Warp-Pox, too sick to paint and that's really saying something.

Still and all, even with a nasty string of failed Fort saves, I've been able to get some paint on the plastic.  Now if only I felt well enough to photograph and describe the darn things.  I'd do it right now, but I've got some moaning and whining and generally acting like a big fat baby to do.  Stay tuned for something just as green, but a lot more pleasant.

Rooftop Scatter

Before we get to today's scatter terrain, let's review, shall we?  Your humble editor has been whiny about how 'dark' his tabletop looks.  For once, he decided to run a test paint job before getting too deep into painting the small city's worth.  Here's how that worked out:

Still needs some color, but it's clean and bright.  With that out of the way, let's look at an experiment in rooftop scatter terrain.  Rooftop scatter is important when you've got rules that encourage the use of cover AND the use of the third dimension in the form of lots of ladders and bridges.

Ordinarily, you can just glue rooftop cover (A.C. units, chimneys, and whatnot) to the roof, but this stuff is getting nested, packed, and stacked, so it's imperative that the stuff on the roof can be removed.  Enter the chimneys:

Those are plastic...not sure what they are called.  They are knobs that you can buy to replace the spinner knobs that you turn to turn on the lights.  They run about 40 to 50 cents each, but they provide decent cover for your figures, and all you have to do is prime them black and dust them with silver paint.

These have been attached these to washers, again, for added stability.  The gray painted washers just look like some sort of flange, so it's all good.  Probably going to need more than four of them, but they are cheap and easy enough to make in those lulls between shipment of figures.

Barrels - The Quintessential Scatter Terrain

It just wouldn't be a miniature wargame without a few barrels on the table.  Check that one off the list:

Nothing too novel here.  Those are all electronic doo-hickeys ripped out of an old and irritating childrens' electronic piano.  They are glued to a base for added weight and stability, then painted up largely as is.  The one little box there breaks up the monotony a bit.  White barrels with colored logos helps brighten up the table and keep it at least moderately pulpy.

Brightening Up the Place

Getting out of the GW all-dark-and-gothy-look is proving harder than anticipated.  I'm just so used a dark palette that my work keeps ending up not nearly as bright as anticipated.  There is one way to brighten up the table though - lights.  These look like streetlights, don't they.  I found them as wooden pegs for some furniture use or other, but they looked like some of the street lights used in the streets around these parts.

They are mounted on washers for weight and stability.  Otherwise, all I did was paint them.  These represent the first of the new phase of work on the project - lots and lots of scatter terrain.  Guess what's on the table for tomorrow...

The Old Park

In retrospect, this park isn't very pulpy.  At some point, that statue of a long forgotten hero of the DPRG will have to come down for a nice art-deco style sculpture.  For now, though, a finished terrain piece is worth two in the "someday" column.

The real reason that I used that statue is that it was a spare - it was donated to the cause by GZG as an example of their Tomorrow's War line.  It's a great sculpt with lots of nice little details, and everyone should buy lots of them to keep Tuffley in business, but the DPRG isn't a force I intend to collect any time soon, so up on a pedestal it goes.

The base of the statue is the bottom part of a Chapstick tube - the part you twist to get the chapstick to come out - the bushes are green scrubbers lightly brushed with bright green and yellow paints, and the rest is all matte board and cereal box mounted on a copy of the movie Shark Tale.  It's nice to get some entertainment out of that useless DVD this way, because you sure as heck can't get any by watching it.

Two Dollar Jungle Templates

At long last, the Abox clan can rumble in the jungle.  The local craft store chain is selling some sort of plastic plant doo-hickeys for about a buck, and two of them are enough to make a slew of jungle stands.  In this case, I've mounted the plants themselves on individual washers so that they can be moved out of the way for miniatures entering the woods dark and deep.

These are going into the boy's big box of Warhmmer 40K stuff, to help round out his collection.  The plants are probably a little too big for practical use with my own beloved fifteens, but those tall spindly beggers could easily be cut down to size to make three times as many tree stands.  I've got something else lined up for the One Box of sort-of-Necromunda-but-not-really.  A dozen or so tree for a buck!  Stay tuned, true believers.  Excelsior!