Sunday, April 10, 2022

Unfinished Business

 I am sure we all have them...those projects which started off well & then sort of just...stopped, incomplete & then moved from sight. As I gear up to get the basement ready to start hosting games again, I was looking at my terrain shelves. 

Those who have been here know the plethora of stuff I have,which prior to the pandemic & the release of Stargrave, didn't include any sci-fi stuff. The shelves were not the most organized & still are not.

However a couple things I've started on is sorting & now completing some previous projects.

The first of these I alluded too on my Rocky Mtn Retreat post. With my focus on 28mm gaming, I've been collecting some railroad stuff. Looking at the various tracks I had sitting around (they of course are of different makes & not compatible) I decided on these plastic ones from a Christmas Train. 

 


It has taken me the beter part of 2 weeks to complete them - 8 Straight, 8 Curved, with an additional curve that has been cut in half to allow for edge matching if I can. 

Had this been a road system, it would have been much faster with quick sprays & maybe a bit of road marking. But these entailed a process of 5 paints, 1 contrast paint & a rust weathering to complete them.

 


Now onto the next project..my dollar store mat fields. I did some of these a couple years ago, but going through my box of them realized many were not finished or even started.

 


As much as I may want crops growing in all of them, the reality is for gaming purposes (Chain of Command) where there will be vehicles moving about, having raised crops wouldn't survive long, so I've decided to stick with some painted foliage as the raised ribs of the carpet. 

As I was painting today, I realized that the darker green mat seems to have a higher rib, so will likely paint them up as the crops & will then repurpose some of the others as harvested plots as seen with my test piece.

 


However I still wanted do do some small plots with foliage crops, which can be placed behind a house in a walled area (thus not having to worry about vehicles driving over them.

 


I've used some static grass, grass tufts & foliage clumps. I also had a small bag of foliage that had bits of red foam which I thought would make great strawberry plants.

So that's what hobby stuff I've been up to for the past couple of weeks. Stay tuned as there are certainly a lot of these unfinished projects to tackle (looking at my trees & woods now). 

6 comments:

  1. I found it waas a very rewarding experience getting stuck into something that is needed but has been neglected for some time. (My own was clumps of grass/bushes, whichtook two or three days).
    Whilst the large field look good and usable, the smaller fileds and plots look excellent and well done getting some variation in - they look great!

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    1. Thanks Joe, the other part of completing these is that I can start to disperse items I will not need. In the case of the rail tracks, I have a number or spare curved sections which I will put into my swap meet box. Who knows, maybe someone will want them for their own projects! I just need to paint up the rest of my fields & then will be tackling my trees & woods pieces

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  2. Nice work on the railway and fields, I tend to use the brown ones as ploughed fields.

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    1. Thanks Matt, alas, the only ribbed mats I've seen at the dollar stores are those dark green ones, so I've been painting them, but yes! Ploughed fields is the goal for some!

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  3. They look excellent Terry and a good mix of the smaller plots.

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    1. Thanks Pat, as much as doing the same effect to the larger plots, the tracks of the tanks would make short work of them.

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