Village Walls and Afghan Compounds.

 Here we have the latest build for my Afghan village, some of those high walls and compounds that seems to be a common defensive terrain feature in that part of the world.

As mentioned in previous posts, this is in preparation for the release later this year of Leigh Neville's 'Fighting Season' the rule variant for 'The Too Fat Lardies' Chain of Command which covers post 2001 counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Richard Clarke of 'Too Fat Lardies' has been working on his own Afghan village at the moment and I have been picking up a few excellent ideas from him for my own village. One of these being modular compounds and another, replacement damaged wall sections ready for when you use those anti-tank bar mines to breach compound walls.

First off, the walls made in the usual way of using pink insulation foam, tile grout, sand and white glue and then painted with dark brown paint, followed by lighter shades of paint.

The walls are also ideal for protecting those opium crops.

The following building is a plastic one from Perry Miniatures which I had originally painted and put onto a base. Having seen what Richard had done with his modular compounds, I decided to give it a go for this building, which now gives me the option of using it as a stand alone building or as part of a compound.

 

These sections also fit in nicely with the other village buildings that I made, if I need to change things around a bit.

 I have set the village up on the table for the usual little photo shoot. The only thing I have improvised on is the main road, which is not perfect but will have to do until I get around to making something more appropriate.

 

 

                                              
                                                          A Taliban come-on ambush.

As this post is so picture heavy, I will leave the latest figures that I have painted for this project until next post. The figures are from Empress Miniatures and they include the Downed helicopter crew, some special forces guys and some more British Infantry.

Richard has invited me over to his place in the near future to try out 'Fighting Season' so I will keep you posted.













 

Scratch built Poppy Fields and more Buildings.

First off, may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2015.

Following on from my last post I have made a couple more scratch built buildings and some Poppy Fields for my Afghan terrain. I have been running this project alongside Richard Clarkes (Too Fat Lardies) superb Afghan Village project in anticipation for the off shoot of the modern Chain of Command rule set to be released in 2015.

For the poppy fields I purchased a plastic Astro Turf door mat from Homebase on offer for £4 and cut this into the required shapes and based them on some old cork table mats that I had and some cardboard. I then used tile grout, followed by wood glue and sand to texture the base. When dry, paint in dark brown paint. I did this on the base and the mat on my first test piece but found you can skip the brown paint on the actual mat and just paint this in dark green paint followed by a lighter green dry brush.

When the paint had dried, I then brushed wood glue  onto the top area of the mat and lightly sprinkled this with tree blossom. You can buy this from most model shops and I used three different types for a little variety and to experiment with the colours.
Red and green for the main poppy fields.
Pink and green for a small  field
Yellow and green for some scrub area. 

I also made a couple of Irrigation  ditches, I pinched this idea from Dougies wargaming blog which has some great ideas on terrain for this period.

I will let the WIP pictures do the talking.

I did all these fields from one mat and I still have some left over.

     
Next up is the scratch built buildings. I wanted several buildings to a base so I could get that narrow village street look, although I also need to make some more compounds to get the proper look for modern Afghanistan.

 
I still need to make a load of high walls and some ruins, plus a dirt track or road for this project but I am tempted to stay in the warm at the moment and paint some more figures and vehicles for this project instead.

The village so far.....