TerrainShed Forests Going Greener!

 At the start of the Covid plague, all kinds of modelling supplies dried up, partly because of the cardboard shortage meaning stuff couldn't be shipped.

So yes, paint dried up too! 😉

First of all, prices went up by 30% and a couple of months later the particular brand of rattle-can I had been using to colour both the forest canopy mass of branches and the tree trunk supports was permanently out of stock.

For various reasons, it was clearly time I switched to a water based alternative:

• toxic fumes from spray cans is bad for the environment AND the user's lungs, especially when forced indoors due to inclement weather (to be fair, even spraying forest components in the fairly well-ventilated garden allowed the body to absorb far too much solvent)
• although conveniently ready-to-use, each can could only spray 2-3 dozen forest sets
• nozzles became easily blocked inside, as opposed to the spray hole (which could be kept clear with the can inverted and only spraying propellant)
• in warm weather (when it was healthier to work outside), the solvent-based spray paint could dry too quickly for some processes to work properly
• flock had to be sealed with solvent-based spray varnish for compatibility with the paint (which was also as expensive, toxic, etc as the paint)
• spray paint was not quite matt, in fact noticeably satin in places

Switching to water-based emulsion made sense:

• readily available in many shades at DIY paint mixing desks
• cheap
• easily diluted to make it even cheaper
• compatible with PVA
• enabled 'short cut' merging of forest canopy manufacturing stages
• probably wasn't going to give me cancer or destroy what is left of the planet

So although the water component means the tree canopies take 10 or 20 times longer than solvents to 'boil off' it's a good trade off as the end product is identical.

6mm and Small Scale Forests For Sale from TerrainShed

When a gamer looks down on the wargaming table, it's a bit like the view from a medium level bomber. The trees seem to join together in one continuous forest canopy. Local colour variations of individual trees blend together.

Resilient dense tree canopy style woods and forests that can prevent close inspection by opponents.

'Tree trunks' provide headroom for miniatures, so they aren't disturbed when
the foliage is lifted and can be adjusted for when the forest is on a hillside (in photos of my earlier games,  the original stick supports were used. The new ones are better!)

The supports are always held firm with no wear and tear on the foliage.

No more turrets displaced or picking your way through individual trees!

Can be placed on slopes, unlike individual tree type forests or forest canopies with rigid bases.

Looks good close up or from the usual long distance gamer's view.

(pictures above are from my own gaming collection with custom shapes)

The four shape designs using Spring, Summer & Autumn foliages

Each set is cut from a standard 7" x 7" (18cm x 18cm) section of tree canopy material and is available as per the TerrainShed website.

In any case, other sizes and shapes can be made by order including 4" hex or regulation DBA sizes. 

There are four Spring/Summer foliage styles available off the shelf... 

• Oak
• Birch
• Evergreen



Winter scene

• Cherry Blossom

...two Autumnal...

• Early Autumn
• Late Autumn

...and three Winter styles:

• Winter (just a few leaves)
• Frosty
• Snowy

Other foliage types being worked on include Apple Blossom and Copper Beech but any can be made to order.

Each forest set comes complete with:

• bark coloured tree trunk supports for each corner and sides of the forest canopy, plus a few spares
• mottled felt 'footprint'
• instructions & useful tips
• sturdy storage box

Feel free to contact me with any purchases, queries, special size requirements or custom foliage jobs, either through this blog, at les@terrainshed.co.uk or on TerrainShed Wargaming on Facebook.

***NEW FOR 2022***

Email your order direct to les@terrainshed.co.uk and arrange payment by internet banking for a 5% discount.

Forests Kickstarter has gone live!

I'd already advertised the two sets of forest tree canopies I'd made as a test on eBay just to see what the interest was.

Nothing, not a bid nor a watch.

After 6mil Phil's bocage hedges did so well on Kickstarter and after much encouragement/nagging by Robert of 2D6 Wargaming, I was convinced me that KS could not only raise the funds for my initial bulk purchases but be a means of advertising for the products as well.

So there it is, live now and 35% funded as we speak.

I posted links up to all the Facebook groups I could find, Robert did a short review of the two (unsold!) sets and I upgraded my Wargaming Website Forum subscription to 'trader' (only £5 for the first 3 months, then the same per calendar month thereafter) so that I could advertise. I will do a promotional video of my own to follow (it was all a bit sudden, I thought the KS would take a few days to get approval but as I had the option of activating it straight away, I thought it was now or...in 3 days time!). At least the trickle of promotional gubbins might keep my project 'bumped' on the web.

Here's hoping!

2mm, 6mm, 10mm & 15mm Forest Tree Canopies Kickstarter

SdKfz Frame Aerials

I bought a new SdKfz 250/3 from Heroics & Ros to replace the one which was first painted in Afrika Korps Airfix desert yellow (that's how long ago it was!) and the new one came with a frame aerial so I decided to have a go at making some for the SdKfz 223s & 263's. The workbench photos were taken on my phone, sadly.

I've got loads of single strand wire (probably steel) from out of telephone cabinets for model railway wiring (the multicoloured insulation makes it easy to trace it under the layout). About 0.5mm in cross-section it was the thinnest I had.

Some square jawed pliers made it easy to get good corners by simply pulling the wire tight

I tried putting in the slight angle towards the front of the frame but it was difficult and just looked wonky, so I just bent the sections into rectangles, butting together on a short side and a blob of superglue bridged the gap. 

A 1mm drill bit was the smallest I had so I used that in a pin drill to make locating holes for the supports.

The supports initially stuck out perpendicular to the body panels. I realised that if I left the insulation on, the supports fitted the holes better but the wire needed supergluing in place or it could twist within the insulation.

Supports were bent to the vertical for the 223s or at suitable angles for the 263s and reglued where it had come loose.

A good way to get the supports on the SdKfz 223s level for the reasonably horizontal frame was to upend them and snip off the excess.

Frames were perched gingerly on top and half droplets of glue applied (I didn't have the gel variety). (The insulation was a bit long in places but once painted, it disappeared).

The aerials for the 8-rads started off rectangular, then a longitudinal central section was dropped in & glued. Cross pieces between the vertical supports were omitted as they were only about 3mm long and were too fiddly for me. The whole was bent slightly over the curved handgrip of a pair of pliers, balanced atop the support and glued. 

They all got 2 coats of Humbrol 27, an ink wash (1 drop black Windsor & Newton + 8 drops water + drop of washing up liquid) which was dabbed off, Humbrol 26 highlighting.

Trafalgar Models balkankreuz from Heroics & Ros were added where possible

6mm France 1940 YouTube Channel

I might as well kill two birds with one stone and tell you that the finishing off of the forest tree canopies can be seen on my new YouTube channel, 6mm Wargaming, France 1940 .

That is all there is at the moment but I have lots of ideas to film and upload. There is going to be an emphasis on 'how I do things' that suit me, my style of play and what I want from wargaming, not tutorials telling you for instance, the best way to paint figures as I am the first to admit I am in the 'OK when viewed 3' from the gaming table' camp.

Tree Canopies 2: Spraying & Flocking

I got reluctantly dragged to the shops today when I was actually wanting to set up another game based on the Vallée des Champs terrain that got so little use recently.

I thought I'd been in all the DIY stores looking for spray paint and was going to have to resort to 'proper' spray paint for modelling but in the B&Q Warehouse in Lincoln they had a huge range and pretty much the right green I was after for just over £6.

Then round the corner, Homebase had the perfect dark brown for tree bark, £9 a can this time.

So because I needed them for the game and just for a bit of a trial run on the four woods I needed. The sides were sprayed dark brown with green on the top, then some light meadow green scatter for deciduous and dark brown all over plus Hornby Dark Green scatter plus a touch of green spray (for adhesion more than anything) and some light meadow green for highlights for a coniferous forest.

They turned out pretty much as expected but I made it awkward by trying to film it for YouTube without a tripod, hence I was working one-handed. Will do some more soon & properly and show you the results.

As I acquire different shades of green, so I will vary the tree canopies from one wood to another but I am still on the hunt for a straw-like dry grass colour.

City Blocks, 2: windows & doors

It's a horrible job trying to paint windows & doors neatly on plain wooden blocks.

I reckoned the easiest way (other than a template) would be to stamp window reveals and door openings onto the wooden building shapes then I would have something a bit 3D.

Mk1

The Mk1 range of architectural stampers consisted of plasticard window shapes superglued onto an old flat bracket in a line so I could stamp one vertical column of windows in one go without having to do a lot of lining up. But it was all very well having them in the middle of a good bit of metal but it was impossible to see if they were in line. 

There was a Mk1A for full height windows for single storey buildings but this was quite hard to impress on the wood due to the pressures needed.

Mk2 & Mk1A

A square doorknob spindle (only 1mm wider than the window shapes) was used instead which meant you could easily see how the plasticard bits were lining up with the other windows.

Mk3

The Mk3 stamper had a bit of plasticard big enough to be a door glued onto another part of the spindle to extend any of the windows down to floor level.

If you hit too hard (I was using a club hammer but gently), the pine would splinter a bit as the window shape was pushed in and also you cannot stamp windows & doors where there are knots in the wood or on the ends of the grain as the wood is just too hard. Hopefully any splintering might be hideable at the painting stage or put some flock on it like ivy. By some fluke I got a regular window arrangement all down some of the city blocks but it was easier to do them in coumns of 2, 3, 4 or 5 and then convert some of the lower windows into doors.

(fairly) Regularly spaced, square windows & doors

Then I started using the slightly rounded end of the spindle to make arched doors which actually looked slightly better than square ones. I gave up on doing chimney stacks for the time being as cutting the plasticard was fiddly but I'll keep an eye out for any suitable scrap as the roofs look bit plain otherwise and I really did want a lot of chimnies running down the apex of the roofs.

Off for some tins of spray paint tomorrow...

City Blocks, 1: Roof Shaping

I was looking at my buildings thinking that they are all OK (at least they will be when they are all painted) for country farms, villages and towns but in Sedan and many other French cities you have long blocks of municipal buildings, hospitals and apartments and multiple occupancy blocks for small offices.

Avenue Phillipoteaux, Sedan

Avenue Georges V, Paris

So I routed the roofs off some wood offcuts using some bog standard bits from Toolstation and as a quick cheap fix to pad out a larger town I think there is potential.

I only had two router bits that gave a suitable profile, one at about 45° and another that gave a sort of domed hipped roof. I might even use some thinner wood to reduce the footprint of the buildings.

The plan is to find some metal bar with a square or rectangular profile to use as a punch for doors & windows and maybe make some porticos, dormer windows and chimney stacks out of plasticard. The cut ends of the wood will need some filling to hide the grain and some sanding overall as paint will raise and roughen the surface.

We'll see how I get on with them. I'll certainly need some longer buildings for the Sedan scenario I've been researching for a while.

Some More Linear Objects

Continuing with terrain features on lolly sticks, today I made rustic fences, hedges and also some painted fences suitable for city boulevards and town squares.

If I never whittle another lolly stick it'll be too soon...

I chamfered and whittled off loads of lolly sticks, some of which had been cut to different lengths for variation this time and trimmed about 1.5m altogether from the aviary wire to see me out with the job in hand. The first lot of fences this time were going to be a more rustic style, bare wood or creosoted finish in Humbrol 98 with the usual Humbrol 29 dark earth and grass mix scatter.

Rustic post & rail fences

The thinnest possible strips were trimmed off green scourer pad for hedges. I used this instead of pipe cleaners as it seems you can only get the chenille variety these days and you can see the twisted wire all too easily compared to the fluffier cotton type that was around 30 years ago. The hedge bases had to be painted brown first as the green pad was open enough to see the ground. 

Hedge clipping

Various Humbrol greens and browns were sloshed on the glued down hedges (which had a good texture but were a horrible blue-green) and different scatters applied until there was a good variation of foliage.

The smartly painted city boulevard central reservations or town square railings differed only in that the grassy area was painted & flocked, then the edge where the stone kerb was going to be had to scraped clean with a scalpel. 

French blue town railings

I've also been experimenting with a fine tweed pattern polyester from charity shop clothes to use as texture for cobbled streets. So far I have sprayed it brown to take the contrast out of the herringbone design and when it is actually in use it will have all sorts of oil pastel shading across the surface. 

Various post & rail fences and hedge

The 'cobbled road' is still too uniform in spite of the amount of spray paint I put on it so I went over a bit of road gently with light yellow ochre and light red-brown oil pastels sideways on to prevent harsh lines and streaks.

With light yellow ochre and re-brown oil pastels

The texture of the cloth meant that I now got the impression of an even pattern of regularly laid cobblestones but without really seeing that it is actually out of scale and herringbone all over.

Post & Rail Fences

I'd been thinking about this since we knocked up an aviary in the garden.

Put simply, one strand from fine aviary mesh is trimmed to the length of a lolly stick (which had the edges chamfered off) and hammered gently into place. I used a small cabinetmaking hammer for this. The base is then painted or flocked as required.

I did this first batch in white for use on well-to-do farmsteads; the next batch will be in a more rustic plain wood finish. I am not going to need that many of them as I doubt they will even afford soft cover let alone incur a movement penalty and are just there for a bit of eye-candy.

Carving Hills

So after yesterday's success with colouring the gaming cloth it is time to start carving up foam for under-cloth hills.

Originally scrounged off a neighbour, the stuff has been hanging around for ages. My brother-in-law is having one sheet for his model railway.

Cut down the middle I now have several sections approximately 36mm thick which will be plenty thick enough for the majority of undulating agricultural land. I might save some of the original thickness bits for escarpments, for example, when recreating the town of Cassel.



I used a steak knife to cut the foam to size, going about a centimetre deep to start the cut off, then hacking all the way through. The shallow initial cut meant that the foam didn't split in the wrong direction and the thinness of the blade helped cutting round corners .A carving knife had a whippy enough blade to enable distorting it whilst sawing to scoop sections out or for shaving layers off.

I now have more than enough to cover two pasting tables placed side by side although a lot of the time the terrain will be fairly flat, completely flat (in places) or only slightly undulating. The river sections shown will probably only be used for special scenarios requiring a deeply cut valley (for example, crossing The Meuse or the attack on Fort Eben Emael)

The new gaming cloth on the table shown above. Just add trees, fields, houses, tracks and rivers. With all the hill sections used the landscape is probably rugged enough to recreate the Ardennes sector. May have to make/acquire some thinner contours.

"Looks Like A Tablecloth"

I have been hankering after new wargaming terrain system for months.

Frankly, I was bored fighting over the same old crossroads, river crossing and field network 30cm sq hardboard scenery tiles. Bless them, I only made them about 30 years ago during wargaming burst part one. They were a bit too flat with mesa-like hills looming up in the middle somewhere and were in desperate need of flocking or something as the original finish was whatever tin of green paint my dad had spare with black and other colours drybrushed in for shading.

I decided to go down the Mark Luther route as I call it as his is the best example of this terrain method on the internet and probably elsewhere.

Pommery Farm, Mark Luther

He uses 8' x 6' tables or thereabouts, places a large number of shaped polystyrene hill sections to form rolling undulations, often taping them into place. A variegated ground-coloured cloth is thrown over the top, eased into any small gullies and felt & carpet-like material is spray mounted into place for fields & rough patches. Roads & tracks are drawn on with chalk pastels and other pieces added like trees, buildings, hedges & telegraph poles.

So an old 'ivory' coloured bedsheet, trimmed to fit two pasting tables when bolted together, was dyed first with Dylon Pebble Brown hand dye then Olive Green (£4-6 in Wilkinsons or The Range) in the hope that it would...well I did not know what to expect, I think I hoped it would somehow mingle in some way.

That ended up a plain sage green so I then balled it up tight and bound it up with string in a few directions for a random tie-dyeing effect. I had to do this three times for the effect I was looking for, possibly because the dye wasn't up to temperature this time but came out a quite nice sage green with dark khaki brown mottled patches.

Going down the tie-dye route from the outset with Pebble Brown would have made an acceptable cloth for desert warfare.

Next to spray some random patches of green, brown and possibly some sort of dry grass kind of colour.

The only yellow I could find was Hycote filler primer (£6 from The Range; Halfords had some for £8) which is more like a ripe sunflower field than dry grass of the Pas de Calais region! Again, the only green was a rather rich bottle green Plasticote in a Super Satin finish (£4 I think, from The Range) and Rustoleum 'Painters Touch' in Nutmeg satin finish (Yorkshire Trading at £4 a can) for a dusty brown.

I hoped that the surface of the cloth was going to be adequately uneven and the spray coat thin enough for the satin finish etc to be invisible and this proved to be the case.

Even the slight breeze lifted the cloth outdoors so in spite of the budgerigar & guinea pig, I sprayed the cloth in the conservatory on some sheets of plasterboard, from a distance of about 40cm with very short bursts. I think I went over with each colour about four times altogether, building up the effect, being especially careful with the yellow.

One technique I discovered by accident was to spray from a low angle almost across the surface of the cloth. In this way, the spray caught on the slight creases in the material from when it had been washed after dyeing giving a sort of false 3D look.

Finished cloth in shade

It remains to be seen how it will wash up (if, indeed I am permitted to put it in the other half's machine). Before it had dried it was quite easy to rub the paint off if handled roughly. 

Finished cloth in sunlight, drying

When I find a decent dry grass colour I'll be spraying it a bit closer to what I really wanted.

Now for some forests...

House Painting

When I picked up a dozen or so buildings off Mick at the Leven Miniatures stand at The Joy of Six the other day, I started saying to him that I hadn't finished the last lot but had to admit that in fact I'd hardly started the previous batch at all.

I do have enough to put together small farms and villages using my metal pre-Navwar Heroics & Ros buildings but the paint jobs are very scruffy now, having rattled around in Elastoplast boxes for over 30 years. Anyway, the Leven resin jobs were just too tempting, same goes for the thatched and leafy cottages I got off Ebay of undetermined provenance.

I made a start on some simple farm & mill buildings that looked solid enough to be made out of slate blocks with a slate tiled roof, I suppose much like constructions near Welsh quarries, although the texture on the warehouse walls is more like cobbles, there was enough on all surfaces to be able to dry-brush. I was going for a fairly plain utilitarian slightly rustic look, hence the ivy and so on. Paints are all Humbrol because all my older stuff is done in it (there wasn't a lot of choice in those days) and I didn't fancy changing.

• 127 US Ghost Grey base coat on walls for mortar
• 33 Black base coat on roofs
• 83 Ochre base coat on Factory chimney for mortar (to be honest, I didn't have anything better)

• 27 Sea Grey dry brushed on wall block work
• 27 Sea Grey dry brushed on roof tiles
• 62 Leather to pick out ridge tiles etc where present
• 62 Leather dry brushed on chimney stack for bricks (too light compared to colour of mortar, see next)
• 70 Brick Red dry brushed on chimney stack for bricks (that's better!)
• 70 Brick Red dry brushed very lightly on roofs to tone down the greyness and maybe add a little iron-staining, also to dull down the ridge tiles where present 

• 33 Black for open archways
• 110 Natural Wood woodwork (plain wooden doors & shutters)
• 98 Chocolate dry brushed onto woodwork
• 34 White wood panelled hoist overhang and sign on factory (toned down with a bit of dry brushed 28 Camouflage Grey)
• Pilot pigment ink pen to fill in window apertures
• Matt varnish top coat
• 98 Chocolate & Javis Scenics Light Meadow or Heath Green for ivy & other growth 

Easy paint job and functional on the table top.

The Joy of Six, 2015

Set in the Sheffield Hallam University atrium this time, the show this year was quite a bit bigger than 2014 with two very large Napoleonics games present.


Although it was mostly sunny all afternoon it wasn't too hot under the glass roof but this made photography awkward with the shadows of roof trusses on some of the gaming tables.

Luckily I had decided to travel light and only had a mobile phone for picture taking so quality wasn't going to be of paramount importance anyway!

After a quick look around I had a long chat with the gamers at the Gorodetschna 1812 table where they were having a lot of fun with a Saxon flanking manoeuvre around a somewhat swampy central battlefield where the Russian and Austrian main forces were faced off.

Gorodetschna 1812

Having watched a few moves I was dying to ask them about the figures and it turns out they are made from MDF, made by Commission Figurines who had a stand next door, are even cheaper than Heroics & Ros but still look really good on a large scale battle.

On then to the Polemos Napoleonics table where I had an interesting talk with Stewart, the Baccus technology guru regarding rules detail and how it can be pared down and still get a realistic outcome and had a demonstration of the rules app for android and an exciting tool it looked too! The free version is said to be a manual combat calculator whereby the player selects the combatants, ticks the modifier boxes and the app gives you the result. (Even on-screen dice which can be rolled by shaking the device!) The paid version will have (amongst other features) an army generator which will enable the player to select the firing unit and any shaken effects are automatically remembered and applied from previous combats.

Polemos Napoleonics

I got roped in to play on the Milton Keynes' DBMM Battle of Lake Trasimene game but quite enjoyed it once I started routing a some of the Roman cavalry.

DBMM, Lake Trasimene

The rules had been simplifed for participation game purposes, which was just as well as I hadn't had a decent sleep for 24 hours. In the historical battle, the Romans were drawn down the lakeside coast then attacked in the flank by warband hordes and pretty much annhiliated, which was happening on the table as well.

At 2pm I attended the seminar for the talk about Polemos rules design and more chat about the rules app.

The Baccus Panel

Nick, Peter, Chris, Stewart

Then to the Heroics & Ros and Leven Miniatures stands to collect my pre-orders.

That's Mick on the left

It's amazing to see how the Leven Miniatures range has expanded in the last few years and casting improved; it is certainly not the little hobby concern that I once thought it was. Must paint some buildings soon! Got some PerfectSix scenic detailing bits here as well. As for my purchases from H&R, I only needed some A13 mk1s & A9s to reorganize my cruiser squadrons a bit, plus a few other oddments as usual.

Some other eye-catching games:

Operation Bagration, 1944 by MAD Gamers

Hungry Legions by Mailed Fist.

Forest canopies sans bases perched atop tree trunks concealed troops underneath

Ligny, 1815 by The Lead Commanders

"Huge tracts of land!"

Nashville, 1864 by the Legion of Blokes.

Lovely painted-on roads and 'model railway quality' grass

Plassey, 1757 by Russ Fewtrell & Ian Taylor.

Tent City!

Waterloo, 1815 by Lee Sharpe & Ian Willey

Permanent terrain boards, I believe

Finally, I would like to thank the Wyre Forest Gamers and Per Broden, not only for putting on a good-looking game but also for storing my luggage under their table while I wandered about!

The usual amount of handout information from Wyre Forest Gamers!

It was a great show (I only had time for one coffee, a stimulant drink going untouched in my backpack and was too interested in things going on to notice the cafe closing so went hungry) and I can only apologize for not mentioning all of the games. With luck there will be more comprehensive show reports somewhere with more (and better quality!) photographs.

Action plan for 2016:

• bring a decent camera
• knock off work early & get some sleep
• arrive for 'doors open' (4 hours not enough to 'do' all the games properly)