Scenery Sorted!

My last few posts have concentrated on the scenery I’ve been making for Dave Stone’s Season of Scenery community challenge and the emphasis has been on making rather than painting. The only bits that had been built and painted were the two Paraguayan chatas and crews shown below (you can see the post about their construction here).

Successive posts covered the construction of earthworks and artillery positions, a watchtower and cutting up an egg box and pretending it would also pass for a bit of scenery! Well, all these bits have now been painted, along with two heavy guns for the emplacements. The picture below shows all of the bits laid out on a games mat.

The next picture shows the same scenery from a different angle. Considering that I’ve worked pretty consistently on scenery for two months I don’t seem to have much to show for it, although I’m pleased with the results.

A close up of one of the artillery positions is shown below. The crew shown here are for my Paraguayan field artillery and were painted about three years ago, whereas the chata crews were painted as part of this challenge.

I painted all of the earthworks and gun positions in a thin brown wash to seal them, followed by a spray of Humbrol acrylic Dark Earth. Despite the sealing coat, this left some small white specks showing through, so I then had to repaint the earth with enamel Dark Earth, which didn’t take as long as I thought it might. The lengths of wood were then painted brown, shaded with a black wash and then drybrushed with a lighter brown shade. Lastly the earth was drybrushed in a white-earth mix and some scatter grass was added in clumps about the place! The picture below shows a different view of the gun emplacements.

I deliberately kept them fairly plain so that they can be used anywhere and anytime between 1850 and 1945. The guns are Shapeways 3-D prints – I decided to go for greyish carriages just to provide some contrast to all the brown earth and wood! The last pieces to be finished were the watchtower and egg box (although I really should call it an ammunition store) shown below.

The tower was painted in the same fashion as the emplacements, although I should maybe have lightened the thatched roof a bit more. The ammo store was the egg box corner covered with Vallejo stone texture and then painted, washed and drybrushed. It started off a different colour from the other earth areas on these pieces, but seems to have got darker and come out the same shade overall. I’ve shown the ammo store in the picture with its access way shown facing the gun positions, but in practice the entrance would be to the rear, away from enemy fire.

Of course, I should probably mention the original fortification that I started (shown below), didn’t like and then replaced with all of the pieces above.

And then there are the hacienda and small buildings that have been started (see below) but which I knew I wouldn’t get finished for the challenge. These extra bits all took a little bit of time as well, so I’ve probably got more done that I thought.

So, now that I’ve run out of cardboard, I can get back to painting . . . cavalry! Maybe it’s time I ordered some more card!