Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Building a 40mm World



With two ECW armies in the works my thoughts turn to how to get a few buildings on the table. I'm guessing that the larger 28mm stuff will generally suffice though with my background in architecture I think I'm going to try a few scratchbuilt structures properly scaled to 40mm as well. I built a bunch of buildings Charles Grant style for my other ongoing Big Project, (25mm 7 Years War using Charles Grant rules and RSM figures...blog to someday follow...) and they turned out really well, a nice "old school" feel. I already have a bunch of river sections that I made for my 40mm French and Indian War collection (another crazy obsession) but the buildings look a little too American for ECW so I'm going to want a few half timbered "Tudor" era structures and perhaps a fortified house to storm. For Ye Kinge's Pokesay Castle is an awesome example and perhaps over Christmas Break I can get the time to try my hand at making at least a few structures...more anon. Big trees are readily available now that christmas season is coming at big craft outlet stores like Michael's and A.C. Moore here in Virginia. The only thing you have to do with them is spray the snow flocking a nice flat green (again Krylon Camo colors are the ticket) and maybe follow with a lighter drybrush highlight. I got a big bag of 21 assorted sized pines for 14.99 USD that range in size from a couple of inches to a more substantial 7" or 8" that looks proper with my 40mm guys.

...could this be any more fun?

4 comments:

old-tidders said...

For 40mm figs I use the the larger 28mm buildings (eg Conflix Historical and Fantasy range); these fit in quite well. Also larger trees 5" plus in size. I have some river sections I made for my 28mm 18C gaming plus a large bridge (although a bit narrow) - these seem Ok with the 40mm figs; this has saved me some work.

For woods/trees for england ideally you should be using deciduous trees to be more representative, I must admit I have a shortage of these (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trees_of_Britain_and_Ireland ).

Looking foward to seeing your 40mm buildings.

-- Allan

littlejohn said...

I just looked at the Conflix buildings and I think they will work out great...though my credit card is still smoking from the last figure order...oh my! Thanks for the tip.

Bluebear Jeff said...

It is 4:30 am here on Vancouver Island (off west coast of Canada) and I'm about to hit the sack . . . but I know that there are a number of "make your own terrain" type websites that have nice tutorials on making trees.

I'm too drowsy to search for them right now, but TerraGenesis is worth a look:

http://www.terragenesis.co.uk/

Hope that it helps.


-- Jeff

littlejohn said...

It's been a while since I visited the Terragenisis site but I'll check it out this weekend.