Monday 4 November 2024

A Bit of Scenery Work

Stew is going to be disappointed with me. In an exchange of comments of an earlier post I said that in my next batch of terrain tiles I was going to make some tiles with trenches in them and he was keen steal my ideas! Well I have finished this final batch an there are no trenches made and no ideas to steal!

Not that I am worried at all about anyone stealing (actually I prefer to say 'borrowing') my ideas...Hell I encourage it...I like sharing. I mean, I borrow  plenty from others. Afterall if Picasso said "good artists copy, great artists steal," then surely theft is the highest form of flattery!!!

There are three reasons I decided not to make trenches. First, since my tiles can only accommodate a below surface depth of 20mm, a proper 28mm trench system would require some sort of construction above the tile surface and that creates all kinds of storage problems. Second, with tiles that at 300mm (12 inches) square I couldn't find a way to make a trench system that could accomodate my existing figure stands that would actually look like a trench system. Third, even though I have armies for periods that made extensive use of trenches (Crimean War, ACW, Great Paraguayan War, Russo-Japanese War and WWI), how many times would I really use them? Plus I already have a trench system that I made way back in February 2013 (link) - maybe I'll just tidy these up.

Instead I have made some rather boring plain tiles, because you can never have too many plain tiles, right? Four represent dips in the ground as I made last time, but unlike the others sets that are square to the tile edges, these run more or less diagonally. Four are just plain tiles. 


Only one tile is a mildly interesting, a river section that widens to almost double my standard river size. It's not that I really needed any more river sections - I have sixteen of them already...enough to run my table length more than one and a half times - but this piece is made specifically to accomodate the recently presented Renedra pontoon bridge - you can see below:






This takes the total number of terrain tiles to 111, allowing me to cover table almost twice and more than enough for my needs.

8 comments:

  1. Well, I love that pontoon bridge, with the engineers hard at work:)!

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    1. Yes it is cool, eh? There is another figure set to go with this, but not yet in stock.

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  2. One hundred and eleven tiles is a massive achievement, and they all look great Mark. Nice to see the pontoniers hard at work. If you were to have created trench tiles they would have had to have sloped upwards toward the trenches to fit in with the other tiles anyway, wouldn't they?

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    1. It would be great to expand beyond thus with some special features, but storage is the limit. It was more the 300 x 300 tiles that limited a trench system. To makes something worthwhile they need to be 600 x 600 to get the angles right.

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  3. A very nice water effect on the river section.

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    1. Thanks Peter. I used the same toilet paper/pva technique (with three coats of gloss varnish) that I used for my sea coast tiles.

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  4. Mark, I agreed that 111's probably enough. The water effects for the bridging square is convincing. Nice to see the pontoon bridge deployed.

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    1. Thanks Joe. It would be easy to take this further, but you are right, enough is enough!

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