Anyway, the idea of at least attempting to assemble the necessary components for having a game appealed to me, so I resolved to have a go at sorting out some scenery. On that note I should probably point out that this may not be the most exciting minis post of all time.
So, yeah. Rivers! Despite going through an interminably long Games Workshop phase back when I was young enough to not really know any better (but GW weren't yet as offensively shitty as they would later become so it was kinda okay) I never actually managed to get any riparian scenery.
Actually, I think once I had a go, buying a long, thin strip of wood from B&Q or wherever to cut into sections. Only to later realize that that would be precisely ZERO USE for making anything with even the slightest curve in it.
Don't look at me like that, I was like 12 or something. There are worse mistakes to make at that age than miscalculating your 40K scenery.
So, anyway. After I resolved to order my 10mm Dinos, I went on ebay for a bit of a browse to see if there was anything interesting to go with them, having never really done anything at that sort of scale before. And so it was that I found this lot of river sections at a not unreasonable price. After my previous experiences with rivers it seemed about time to try and make up for my mistakes.
Obviously there was still some preparation to be undertaken. The pieces themselves were cast in plaster of all things. Not a material I'm used to working with. There was some measure of sanding and cleaning to be done of course. To be fair I probably could have done a lot more to fill in various air bubbles and other imperfections, but I didn't go mad as it's not like the pieces were overall exactly high definition. Quite suitable for scenery that will be primarily viewed at a distance, but there's a reason they cast stuff in resin and metal, ya know?
I was a little concerned about whether I should try mounting the pieces on some sort of base material or not, but in the end didn't think it was worth the fairly significant effort it would have added. Plus it may have caused added complications in fitting the pieces together. What I did do however was give the bottoms of the pieces a coat of emulsion house paint that I had lying around. This would keep the bases protected from wear and seal them, preventing any traces of plaster dust on my nice clean gaming table.
Painting them was then relatively straightfoward. Brown muddy banks, green vegetation. I didn't want to go all green as the primary use I wanted these for was of course the Dinosaur minis (no grass in the Mesozoic apparently), but I still wanted them to be useful for other miniatures and scales as well. A bit of green drybrushing over sections of the banks helps to give a sort of scrubby feel to things without going overboard. The water itself is obviously done in with blue, but I then used some white and silver for highlighting both before and after the ink washes to give it a kind of shiny liquid type look.
It wasn't until I was doing this ford / delta / marshy piece that I realized that these pieces could be quite fun if done up for liquids other than water. Use a black and red colour scheme and you could do some pretty nifty lava flows. Or maybe do the water bright green for rivers of acid or toxic waste. Not really then sort of thing that would useful for what I was going for here, but could still be fun.
Of course, just rivers on their own would not make for a full battlefield. For Dinosaurs or anything else. I would also need a bit of vegetation as well. And whilst searching through some old boxes of miniature parts I found something quite suitable for my purposes.
Whilst perhaps not entirely scientifically accurate, these tropical plants are at least appropriate looking. And for all I like to bitch about them, these are actually old Games Workshop pieces. I've no idea if they still do them, but these came with a boxed edition of Warhammer 40K. 3rd edition I think, although I could be wrong.
Anyway, point is I found a sprue of woody parts and a couple of sprues of leafy parts. And I thought to myself that tese could be useful. The main problem with the materials available as the lack of bases. Whilst the sprues contain lots of stalks and branches there are only 4 base parts. Obviously they're designed for making a few large pieces rather than a bunch of little ones. But since I was working in a much smaller scale I could afford to divide things up a bit more.
So I got some more of the bases that the Dinosaur miniatures come with, drilled a few holes and then started mounting individual parts with the aim of using up as much of the available bits as possible. The idea being to create a number of stands featuring vegetation that can be used to form the edge of areas of cover.
Obviously I did a couple of larger trees as well. This would give me something to put in the middle of said areas as well as just being big old trees. As with the rivers these could also be used for other games, only rather than forming trees they'd now be large bushes and patches of low lying scrub. One of the main issues with dividing everything up this way was that there were a lot more forks than straight pieces, more than could be capped of with leaf pieces. The solution to this was simply to trim the pegs from the unused end, then stick a few tiny balls of rolled up green stuff on. Instant coconuts! Or other applicable buds or fruit anyway.
Really the only problem with these is that even dividing things up in this fashion I still don't have quite enough stands to achieve the amount of cover I'd like. Really I should either get another set or find some other suitable materials to construct some extra stands out of. Preferably something that doesn't take quite so long to put together.
Still, overall I think I've got a decent start here to some relatively versatile scenery.
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