Building a Wild West town

All sorts of real-life events blocked my time and energy to wrote blogs since last October. But I haven't been idle in other respects, so here is my first blog in a few months about a styrofoam Western town made for What A Cowboy! 

Techniques are pretty straightforward as the buildings are mostly foam boxes. I used the jigsaw method to separate the different floors and ShiftingLands templates for the columns. 

Part of it is still under contstruction but it is table worthy! 

 

Proxxon Styrofoam cutter first tryout

The very best for 2020 to you all!

My Christmas gift for myself was a Proxxon Styrofoam cutter and some Greenstuffworld rolling pins. The latter have still to arrive, but the cutter arrived right on New Year's Eve! So of course on this first day of 2020 I had to play with it somewhat. 

First tried some freehand stuff. Templates and a few add-ons will come in handy. Not so easy to do. 

Then I tried my hand at some small furniture and a few Jersey Barriers. 

And of course they had to be painted as well....

Making small terrain is remarkably easy and quick this way. Can't wait for the Greenstuffworld package to come in so I can start on buildings and such! 

Bocage hedgerows the easy way

Battlefields through the ages have always been criss-crossed with all kinds of obstacles. No matter how well the commander chose his battlefield, it rarely was as flat and empty as many of our tables. 

Since centuries many rural sites have been crossed by hedgerows to mark terrain borders or herd cattle. Hedges are therefore one of the most generic terrain types possible. I made some many years ago but they were too few (and too ugly, to be honest) so I decided to take a second stab at it. Quick and dirty was again the motto. I have seen some real works of modelling art used as bocage, but I had little time and limited resources, so what I had, had to do and be finished in a day. 

I based my design on the French bocages of Normandy fame. But they can be found all over Europe.  A low earthen wall, topped with sturdy hedge plants left relatively uncut forms the basis. The hedge plants are often woven back into the foliage, producing over the years a nearly impregnable organic wall, ideal for keeping cattle in its place. As Normandy proved, it worked relatively well for tanks too! 

I started with simple materials: Sorbo cleaning pads, glue, sand and grit and flocking materials.

I cut the bases from plastic sheet (some sign I had lying around) and made crude earthen walls from cut styrofoam. On top of those I places the cut cleaning pads, cut with an irregular top to represent the wild growth of the average rural hedgerow. I used a hot-glue gun for this part of the assembly.

As you can see below I made most of them the same length, which makes it easy to build up the table. I made some corners and shorter pieces to fit the odd ends. I equipped some of them with trees to break the monotony and one piece showing a gap to pass through.

For the next step I mixed several grains of sand and grit for the covering of the earthen base. Birdsand, playpen sand and aquarium bottom covering are perfect for this and can be had cheaply in large quantities. 

I covered the base thickly with glue (Heki flocking glue in this case) so the sand would stick well and would protect the styrofoam from the spray paint I planned to paint them with. Just drag the piece through the sand a few times and leave to dry. Left on the picture a finished example.

This step is essentially repeated with the flocking material. I dabbed big splotches of glue onto the cleaning pad hedges and just pushed them into the flocking stuff. This resulted in irregular sides that reinforced the wildly growing image of the tops. Once dry, I spray-painted the hedges olive camo green to get a uniform green color.  

The I painted the earthen base drab brown (cheap acrylic hobby stuff) and added highlight and some grass flock to blend the hedge parts in with the Battlemat I usually use for a playing surface. A acrylic matt varnish spray to finish and fixate everything and it was done!

Below some pictures of the final result, shown next to some Foundry Home Guard and a Warlord Matilda II.