Base Re-design.

Hey All!

Having started terrain boards for Russia - specifically the battles toward Stalingrad, I came across a website with many great modern pictures of the areas I am planning to model. The site is here:

http://tonygillham.com/albums/

Its a great collection of pictures that show the terrain and building of many areas I am trying to replicate. One drawback of this was that I realized that the current basing of my Grenadiers is off. I was never really happy with them anyway and thus began what most people would consider a serious waste of time! I removed all the basing on 30 plus stands and started again...Luckily, I used PVA in the original basing so a simple soak in plain water softened the material up enough to remove with little effort. I was worried that the minis themselves would begin to lose their paintjobs so kept the bath time short!

Pictured below is somewhat what I am trying to represent. It is a picture of a gully near modern Spartanovka  from Tony Gillhams site...

Ignore the gully bottom grass and look to the right. This is what I am looking to represent. What I came up with to replace the original is, in my opinion, better representitive of the silty, grassy steppes characteristic of the areas around Spartanovka and Stalingrad. Its a mix of blond-colored static grass and Silflor 'Buffalo Grass' which is a very expensive product but looks great!

















I applied the blond static grass using my home-made Ion generator (cost about 5 buck) instead of the Noch $200 dollar job. It works pretty good but Im sure the extra 195.00 would be worth the difference -ya right!

I used the late summer version of Buffalo Grass but felt it was too dark so I finished up by drybrushing the ends to get the proper lighter two-tone effect I wanted.

As well, pictured above are the finished tree bases. The originals were a quick fix and were pretty boring looking so I spruced (lol) them up with sloped sides and a mossy, rocky ground cover.

Three down, 27 to go!

Cheers!

Troy