THE GRASS

I decided to add a couple of final touches to the boards I was making in the form of rough stony ground and patches of grass and bushes.

I scrambled around for bags of flock and grass and discovered I had very little but a quick trip to my local model shop gave me a great variety of grasses and flocks in all shades of green and brown.

I then mixed a few of the flocks together to give three shades, a light green-brown, a mid green and a dark green. All the shades had different browns mixed in as well but the overall colours were still green.

I used a big plastic container to put each shade in as I was applying it to the board.

A selection of flock and grass…

Water down some PVA glue by about 5 parts water to 1 part glue. This watered down glue will flow much more easily onto the sand or flock you have used on your table. Sometimes it may flow too much so watch out.

Paint a random patch of glue onto your board and then sprinkle your flock or grass mix onto the area covered by the glue.

Make sure all the glue is covered by your mix.

Then simply lift the board up and tip the excess flock back into your container.

Another method is to use enough flock that you can paint the patches of glue onto your entire board and then add the flock and instead of tipping the board to remove the flock use a vacuum cleaner but make sure it has been emptied.

When you have finished you can just empty the cleaner into a suitable storage device.

First glue down the lightest shade of flock you want to use, you can lay down quite large patches of this flock as the contrast between your board and the flock will not be huge at his point.

Try to be as random as possible when applying your flock. It is harder than it looks to make it look random.

For the second and third layers of flock you want to create a gradient effect between colours. If you are using the watered down PVA this should be much easier as the glue will soak through the flock already glued down and provide that natural gradient.

Using the watered down PVA you can get your different coloured flocks to blend together.

For the Final touch I glued down small patches of rough gravel around the undulating ground and then drybrushed

them with bleached bone when they were dry.

Use neat PVA glue as the watered down mix will not give you enough grip to keep the gravel in place. Apply the PVA glue where you want the gravel to go and then pour the gravel onto the glue. Because gravel is heavier than flock it is unwise to try and tip the board to remove the excess gravel.

Wait overnight or the best part of the morning or afternoon for the PVA glue to set and then remove the excess. Finally drybrush the gravel with a light ivory coloured paint.

Don’t be alarmed if stones come loose while you are drybrushing them it is best that the loose gravel is removed now so just carry on and remove any loose gravel when you have finished.

The finished table in all its painted glory suddenly feels much more “real”.

You should be able to produce quite a large number of tiles or boards using these techniques. In fact you can use the same ideas but just change the type of terrain you are making. You can have some great looking tables to put you terrain on even if

you just use a cloth or mat you can use the same techniques with spray paint to make the battlefield that little bit more varied and pretty.

On the next page we have included some larger shots of the desert boards we created along with some grass boards that we created during the writing of the January issue of Wargames Journal. The green tiles were made for a 10mm game and they really do show what you can achieve with a modicum of effort.

They are much more “modular” than the desert tiles as they have all the scenery other than the houses modelled onto them. Artex was used on the roads and we used some 10mm dry stone walls as our hedge rows. We just covered them in standard green flock and then painted them with the rest of the table. The trees were just pressed into the tiles and held with a dab or PVA glue. These two tables are very different and demonstrate a happy medium for gaming: they look the part but didn’t take forever to make!

In the next part of this series we will look at starting from scratch to assemble a 6’

x 4’ gaming table. We will also provide a couple of scenarios that make use of the terrain we show you how to make.

The harsh desert of North Africa - ready for Rommel’s Afrika Korp or Alexander’s Companion Cavalry A sleepy French village awaits rhe advancing British force - its German occupiers well hidden ...

During World War I Verdun was a fortified French