Pimp my hills, part 3

Work on my hills continue. After finishing the thistle-covered hill it was time to go back to the desert hill. While it was in essence finished, Jonathan at the My Tiny Things blog pointed out that weathering the small rocks would blend them in more.

That's better!

So I popped out the white paint and the trusty old drybrush and went nuts with them. More pictures after the break:

Pimp my hills, part 2

In my previous post I started the desert hill, now I'm going to show you what I did with the other one. My aim this time was to provide a small scenic piece that both would bring some "flavour" to the gaming table while at the same time providing some sort of cover or at least breaking up line of sight. The desert hill was aimed at 6mm games while this hill would be used with 20mm figures.

Tools of the trade: model railroad flock, thistles and nettles.

Doing terrain for the larger scales is a great opportunity to go overboard with different techniques, detailing and whatnot. I often get inspired by Model Railroad layouts and there is no reason why a wargames table shouldn't try to reach the same level of realism. Sure, there is a practical limit on how much stuff you can put on the gaming table itself, but independent terrain pieces can be small dioramas in themselves. As I wanted to try out some new materials I had "accumulated" (the stuff just materialise in my hobby room, I have no idea how it gets there, or so I tell my wife) I decided to make a small grassy knoll overgrown with thistles and nettles.

Pimp my hills, part 1

Hi gang.

I'm a big fan of Amera Plastic Moulding's vacu-formed terrain. Made from plastic styrene sheets it's light-weight and cheap. Details are a bit vague, a limitation of the medium really, but it's not hard to improve the models. They have specialised in terrain in various scales and offer something for both fantasy, sci-fi and historical gamers.

A couple of cream pies? There are surface details on the hills but the white shiny plastic makes it hard to photograph.

Today I decided to make something of a couple of hills I bought a while ago. They are part of the F213 scenry set of three hill shapes, one low, one medium and one rocky. They are all around 15-20cm in diameter; the lowest around 3 cm high, the highest around 7-8 cm high. The set is quite versatile so I bought two. I had a couple of different ideas for the lowest of the hills.

Total Battle Miniatures review, and stuff...

Bit of a slow rate for my updates now, because I'm actually playing games. I'm currently planning and playtesting the Operation Supercharge scenario as well as trying out Fantasy Flight's X-wing game that I have finally got hold of. However, the playtests are hardly blog material because of the unfinished minis and the generally slow action because we now and then stop to discuss some issues that have cropped up.

Likewise, my X-wing games have been with my sons and I wanted to focus on the game and help them maneuvering and so on instead of taking notes and photographing each turn. I did take a picture though to prove I did play a game :-)

Look at the size of that thing!

Instead I want to take the opportunity to catch up with some stuff I have been meaning to write for a while now.