LARGE WALLED FARMS, plus MAGNETIZED HILLS & TREES. NAP WIP 6.

 It has been a while since my last post but I have been busy on the terrain front both with this and the next blog post.

This post covers the four enclosed farms plus 13 feet of hills/ridgeline, plus just under half of the 90 trees that I have made.

 

I pinched the idea of magnetized hills from Geoff at Purple Lion Creations and had the hill and river laser cut MDF templates made up by the talented and very helpful Colin at Charlie Foxtrot Models.

 I have used a Perry Miniatures 28mm figure in the picture for scale.

 The hills/ridgeline can be used with or without the magnetized trees and I have used textured coins as blanks to go over the magnets when not using the trees. (check the date on the coins as only the later ones are magnetized) 

Using magnetized trees gives you the flexibility to remove your trees for figure placement, also I think they look better on your hills if they are growing up vertically rather than out at an angle perpendicular to the slope of the hill. 

I will also be using magnetized trees for my river banks and woodland bases, plus if the table gets knocked, your trees don't fall over.

When making your hills it is also good to make sure the slopes aren't too steep and you can still place your troops without them falling over. 

  

 

Having said that, I have made some rocky outcrops that will be more suitable for single-based skirmish troops when it comes to maneuvering. 

And of course, they are timeless and can be used for other gaming periods.

 

Moving onto the buildings, I went with Hovels ltd, as they have a smaller footprint 25-28mm, rather than the larger MDF laser cut buildings from Sarissa. 

The Sarissa buildings are ideal for when using the Too Fat Lardies Sharpe Practice skirmish games but I also wanted to use them with the General d' Armee Napoleonic rule set by Dave Brown and the Sarissa buildings just take up too much space for my liking.

As it was, the Hovels La Haye Sainte farmhouse still had a big footprint and I had to reduce the size of the rear garden and based it in three parts. As for Hougoumont and Papelotte, I used some of the buildings from these sets and based my own smaller generic enclosed farms using additional sections of wall and gates, both commercial and scratch built.

Farm 1. La Haye Sainte (the orchard I had made previously).  

   

Farm 2

Farm 3

Farm 4

Some group.

As usual, the link for buying volume 3 or putting your name on the waiting list for a reprint of volume 1 or 2 of Setting the Scene, then please contact Steve at  stevelampon@yahoo.co.uk  

Cheers,

Pat.

START OF THE ARTILLERY, PLUS MORE CAVALRY - NAP WIP 5

 

Although the bigger part of this collection is aimed towards General d'armee, the sabot basing allows me to skirmish game using Sharp Practice. As I have recently just played a couple of the Sharp Practice games it gave me the incentive to have ready some artillery and cavalry on the table and an opportunity to do a couple of test pieces before painting up the rest of the artillery. 

In the first couple of pictures, you can see a Warbases MDF engineers cart and French ammunition caisson. Horses and caisson driver are metal and also from Warbases. 

The French gun team was a mixture made up from the spares box. The gun is from the Victrix plastic artillery set. The limber is metal from Eagle Figures. Horses are metal from Warbases and the rider is from my plastic spares box, Perry Miniatures French cavalry bits and pieces.

     The French artillery gun and crew are plastic from Victrix.

 British horse artillery gun and limber are metal from Perry Miniatures. The gun and crew I had painted previously but the limber and team are recent. The Perry gun crew only comes with four figures so I added another figure and officer from Eagle Figures to make up the six needed for Sharp Practice.

The latest cavalry unit that I have finished is the 5th Belgium Light Dragoons. Don't look too closely at the uniforms and equipment as these came out of my spares box. There is a mixture of Wargames Foundry, Warlord Games and Perry Miniatures horses. The riders come from the plastic spares that I had leftover from the Perry Miniature cavalry sets.  There was a bit of mixing and matching, greenstuff added here and there, and some scraping and painting but it has given me an extra cavalry unit and didn't cost me anything.

The Belgium 5th Light Dragoons were brigaded with the Dutch 6th Hussars as the Netherlands Cavalry Division, 2nd Light Cavalry Brigade at Quatre Bras. 

  Allied cavalry so far, 5th and 6th plus a unit of Brunswick Uhlans.

  I will be starting on making more terrain next so the figure painting will have to slow down a little. Hopefully, the next post will have plenty of buildings, magnetized hills and rivers, maybe some more mats and upgraded trees. 

If you find you are having problems trying to leave a comment on this blog, that is because I have started putting a block on the comments due to the fact that I am fed up having to delete half a dozen spam comments every day.

After each new post, I will open the comments section for a few days and then shut it down until the next blog post. So if you feel the urge to comment, then don't leave it too long after my posting.

As usual, the link for buying or putting your name on the waiting list for the Setting the Scene books is stevelampon@yahoo.co.uk 

Cheers,

Pat Smith.