Three tree woods and mold lines

 Back to earth. I've started work on the first batch of minis in between playing Catan with the wife and kids, playing Magic, installing rainpipes and keeping generally busy.


As promised a look at my trees. They are quite shabby after years of abuse and admittedly need some redoing. The concept is as described in the latest Battlegames magazine, but using lichen. What I did is mounted them on a board which started as a single rough bean or kidney shape. Cutting this board in several irregular pieces and rounding the sharp corners gives three seperate woods, or fitted together -because the woods fit together snugly as a jigsaw puzzle- a small and larger wood or one large wood. Seperating two adjoining pieces by a couple of inches leaves a nice "track" or road through the woods. I guess a larger sheet of triplex or MDF could be used, making a jigsaw puzzle like design with five or more seperate pieces, a couple of feet square. Anyway, the thing I like is the "seemless" joining of the pieces when used as larger terrain feature. Anyway, this method of planting trees is still going to be used in the future.

The wood in action.

Next up: I've just prepared the Hasselse Garde. Although these Minden sculpts were as good as flash and moldline free, I still wanted to go through the cleanup process. For scraping moldlines, I like to use a heavier blade in my X-Acto. A cardboard nail file (emery board?) was used to clean the underside of the bases. A drill was used to prepare the hands to recieve the spontoons and flagpole. And a rat tail file used to, ...well file...the places that were filed were then sanded with several grades of fine sandpaper. I sometimes wrap some sandpaper around a cocktail stick or file so as to reach the more difficult places (between the legs, ...of the sculpts of course). For cleaning sculpts like these , I don't use flat files as I find they damage the models to easily.

The Hasselse Garde undergoing severe medical examinations.

This time  I'll close with a question. In the Prussian 7YW armies: what were the lenghts of the spontoons, flagpoles and the flag dimensions? Okay, that's three quetions rolled into one: a bit like the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Happy gaming

Pjotr