EXT: Camping Spot

Let's go camping!




The fondest memory I have of camping is a childhood fortnight near Berwick-upon-Tweed on the north east coast of England. It rained solidly the entire time. On the single sunny afternoon, a game of French Cricket got out of hand and I managed to belt my brother in the face with the bat. He required stitches inside his lip, but worse, I was declared out and lost the game.

To recapture this spirit of British Holiday Excellence, what better than some cheap and cheerful terrain making?

I was inspired by some bloke on a Necromunda Terrain page on Facebook. He'd made some great cover for his hive by getting various plastic bottle tops and packaging, draping them with babywipes soaked in PVA and painting them to look like tarps. Fantastic idea! I thought the same would go for tents, and the internet agreed, having already come up with that idea ages ago and made loads of good tutorials.

The first two attempts were a-frames made of lolly and cocktail sticks, then draped with the ersatz cloth. Not bad, but I probably should have cut the fabric to a pattern first. To give one a bit more detail, I made a faux animal hide to drape over it. The other one, I gave up on rather and snapped it to make an abandoned tent.

These are painted with Army Green and Ogryn Camo or Desert Yellow with Zamesi Yellow over black undercoat. Hides with Leather Brown and Rakarth Flesh, wood with Dryad Bark.

Version two was a bit more solid. This is a cardboard template underneath, with ribs of sprue glued along the edges and back. Then you can hang the fabric over them and give it more shape. This time, I slopped the babywipe over, let it dry and then trimmed it afterwards, so the shape came out better.

Here's the template, although I didn't bother checking my measurements and the sides didn't quite touch the floor when I glued it. Not in a big way, but still. Check your measurements, kids!

You can see it with the sprues on in the corner there, with scalloped edges cut in to make it look tentier.

All of them got my signature snow paste on the base, although it came out funny over the flock I'd already added. Kind of curled up at the edges, not ideal, so I tried to hide it a bit with Krycell snow powder. That stuff is the very devil to use, I have now decided after a dozen coats of varnish and PVA sealant. Looks great, but not designed for wargaming. It has such a fragile finish, it keeps breaking off in powdery chunks.

Now, you can't have a proper camping holiday without your parents dragging you to some benighted ruin in the name of Heritage. Trawling the local summer flea markets, I nabbed a resin chunk of Lord of the Rings stuff, part of the wall from this diorama:

I was just missing the base, the hobbit, the fell beast with its rider and the supporting corner wall, what eBay describes as 'nearly new'.

I took it home, glued it to an old ice cream tub lid and made an additional supporting wall from plasterboard. You can get a very decent stone effect on this simply by drawing the brickwork on, then scoring it with a blunt pencil and pressing a bit of rock into the card to give it texture. Paint, snow and water effects, and presto! It blends into my existing collection nicely.

Black basecoat, then Eshin Grey, Dawnstone and Longbeard Grey drybrushes for the dark stone. XV88, Karak Stone and Pallid Wychflesh for the light. Green ink and Algae Green wash for bits where damp would gather. Rhinox Hide over the mud.

Some nice details here and there, like a mauled tower guard shield and some broken arrows. Mostly hidden under snow, but still there.

The water effects came out nicely! The snow went on first, I had to paint over it for the muddy bottom, but that gave a good texture. 

Bit of crushed glass on the edges for slush. The water went in as two layers, and the first crept up the walls (capillary action from the snow powder) quite a lot. But it actually looks pretty good, nice and melty!

Here's the side with the stairs

Here's the side I made. You can tell I made it, the stonework is rather less sharp in its detail. Not a bad match, though, especially under the snow!

And finally, a hill to climb.

This is made from a novelty Halloween plastic candy tub. I took the lid off and filled the interior with insulating foam, then trimmed it and coated it with blobs of spackle wrapped in paper, then PVA papier mache once those had dried. The steps round the outside are the spare offcuts of all those MDF buildings I did earlier in the year, the bits that filled the window frames on the sprue.

It's on a wooden base, so to keep it fairly light I kept the inside as hollow as possible. I used old sprue pieces as scaffold for the stairs, then lots of glue gun to weld it all together. I was going to cover the whole thing, but my daughter decided a spooky cave at the back would be more excited, and she was right.

The tree is a locally-sourced stick. So is all that leaf litter! I can't be spending money on the fancy modelling stuff. I think it's the seed cases of birch trees, there's a lake near us where we swim in the summer surrounded by them. And the roads are covered in this stuff, dry yellow piles of it that look exactly like tiny leaves. So I scooped some up and brought it home.

The stairs are model friendly most of the way up. The top few got a bit too steep, just enough to tip your model back so it rolls down the rest to the bottom. Almost like a fiendish trap, just not deliberately. 

Plenty of room up there for some artillery. Or a large squad of Hellblasters. Why did I build this again?

The Krycell powder looks even better over leaf litter, but once again, it does not set well. There's a thick layer of various sealing elements on this, god help me if it ever gets near a naked flame. And it's still shedding powder on my fingers in a few places, not helped by the fact I got carried away and put it on a bit thick.

Still, Mount Greyskull is a good addition to the table! And it's about the right height that I can make bridges between it, the new ruin and some of my other bits. Now I just need a giant icy river to go under those bridges...