I have been slowly working on the terrain for Bolt Action for a demo table and for a display board for Claymore 2014. 6s2hit had two of Warlords Ruined Farmhouse kits sitting on the shelf and I decided whilst at work the other day that I was going to get them and add them to the collection of terrain. This time I decided to start my work with a little inspiration so I watched Kelly’s Hero’s….
All my previous terrain has been built on a 6mm MDF base to give a strong foundation to build on top of. I gave the farmhouse kit a quick clean with a craft knife but it really was almost ready to go out of the box. At this point I wasn’t even sure how I wanted the final piece to look, this tends to be the way I work and it seems to have worked so far. After some trial and error I chose the following lay out and got the bits glued down to the base.
The little bundles of rubble that Warlord have added to the kit are excellent for tidying up the corners where normally there may be a rough seam or joint in the building. I had thought that I may put down the remnants of a wooden floor on this building but then I remembered that I had a pile of textured vinyl floor tiles sitting in the spare room.
You can see the wrecked floor look I was going for and at this point I added some sand to the center to soak up the super glue. I was at this point sitting watching The Pacific again and I figured that in the area of Villers-Bocage the German army and in this case Panzer Lehr would have turned ruins into defensible positions. So I added some Tamiya 1/48th scale sand bags and fuel drums.
With the old saying in my head that less is more I decided to litter the ground with remnants of a military occupation. I added corrugated sheets from some textured plasticard I had left over from a previous project. I added some broken metal poles that had been abandoned in the retreat and the remnants of some tank traps that are now wrecked. At this point I added a German helmet to the sand bag wall and a machine gun to the upper window of the farmhouse, the machine gun however did not survive the dry brushing.
The next stage was to get the base cut to the right shape and size and to add the sand to give it texture, I had to get creative at this point as I don’t own a saw. I did borrow my dad’s saw but I left it in the 6s2hit shop when I was working on the trench line. Now began a phase of creative hacking with a Stanley knife and some of the terrible £1 shop sandpaper I bought. (I got a sander for Xmas, so its all good now)
A quick undercoat with some black paint, im planning to spray undercoat the next one but it was raining and im not allowed to spray models in the house. (The red wall in the spare room is a lasting memorial to my mistakes)
Three drybrushes with various shades of grey, im famous for my grey schemes apparently. The main parts of the house are complete and I began to pick out the remnants of the plaster on the building while watchin raiders of the lost ark constantly thinking that Amy in Big Bang Theory was right in what she said about the movie….
It is at this point that my Wip shots fall down, I reached this point in the build on Xmas eve and real life took over. Skip ahead to Xmas day and im sitting on the floor of the living room with not much to do and I started to finish the building off. An hour later its complete and I forgot to take shots of this stage but I do have a few of it completed.
Overall im very pleased as it will fit in well with the rest of the terrain and will feature in the upcoming Edinburgh League of Gamers Bolt Action Tournament planned for the first quarter next year. The flexibility of the kit makes it in my opinion better than the laser cut MDF kits but then again I have only seen a few of those. The next building is sitting in the box and im about to start building it once I get this uploaded to the blog.
Keep your ears and eyes open for the upcoming release of Home Guard Radio who’s first episode should be out by the end of January and will have a monthly release schedule.
