Swamp Terrain - The Silent Watcher

Here is the latest addition to my swamp board terrain. Like I did with the pillars in last week's blog post I wanted to try my hand at creating the look and feel of the environment slowly reclaiming man made structures. If you google search jungle ruins more than likely you will come across a picture of some ruins with trees growing on top of the structure and like with the pillars I wanted to make a tree growing on top of a giant skull structure. So let take a look at how I created this piece.

Swamp Board Terrain - The 3 Pillars

I have completed another piece of terrain to go along with the swamp board theme and I've aptly named it the 3 pillars because, well it has 3 pillars on it. Rather than go into details of how I made the pillars I'll refer anyone who may have missed the post where I created a piece called the Sentinel. You can see how I made the pillar here. This is a much larger piece than the last ones and I've incorporated a tree which has its roots growing out and over the ruins, much like you see in images of temple ruins in Southeast Asia. Recently I purchased some Hirst Arts molds to create blocks and tiles to make it easier and quicker to knock out terrain pieces rather than making the blocks by hand. In this project I've started to incorporate some of those blocks into my terrain. So lets take a look at how I created the 3 Pillars.

Swamp Board Larger Terrain Pieces

The Gateway and Sentinel

I finished up the next two pieces of terrain for the swamp board. These two pieces are the largest built for the board to date but by no means the largest I am building. Earlier pieces of terrain I created fell under the category of either simple ruins or area terrain but these next pieces (and future ones) will have a specific look and feel for the board so I decided to name them accordingly. So let's take a look at the steps I used in creating these ruins.

Swamp Board Area Terrain

 Realistic Area Terrain

In my last post I had created some simple ruins to use as area terrain, obstacles, and areas of cover. As a continuation of that theme I have finished up working on areas of vegetation, fallen logs, and large boulders that infantry sized models can hide behind for cover and also add to the overall aesthetic of the board. So lets look at the steps involved in creating the areas of vegetation terrain.

Swamp Terrain - Simple Ruins

Now the that bulk of the playing surface is finished I have started working on the modular terrain pieces that will inhabit the playing field. Since I will be working on multiple projects at the same time I figured it would be easier to document and create the step-by-step instructions for each theme rather than throw a whole slew of different projects into on post. So in this series I wanted to create a "simple" set of ruins. What I mean by that is that these will be just a series of small walls that may have once been a part of a wall or a series of small structures that have fallen apart over time and suffered the ravages of time. So without making you wait anymore, let's see how I went about creating the simple ruins.

Swamp Board - Base Complete!

As the title says, I pretty much have finished with the base board of the project with the exception of adding the water. (That will come once all of the flock finishes drying) So at this point I think it's safe to say that I can now move onto the stage of building out the modular terrain pieces that will be going on top of the board and provide cover and obstacles for the armies. So let's take a look at the final steps for creating the base of the board.

Swamp Board Update

The past two weeks have been pretty busy with Spring coming around to New York but I was able to squeeze in some time to work on my swamp board. I learned an important lesson while working on the next phase and that is not to compromise your projects by using cheaper materials. If you remember in my last post I left off with me gluing the plastic tiles to the board. Well, I ran out of my glue so I ran to a local hardware store instead of Home Depot and the only wood glue they had on the shelf was Elmer's wood glue. I have always used Tite-Bond in all of my previous projects (and have always had great success with it) but I didn't want to hold off on my progress so I picked up the Elmers. Sure enough, after I finished gluing all 400+ tiles, some of them started to pop off as I was wiping away the excess sand. So I tossed the rest of the Elmer's away and made another trip to pick up some more tite-bond.  So let's see where I am with the project right now.

Born on the Bayou

I've made more progress on the swamp board over the past week. While I am getting a lot of things done on the board, the pace may seem a little slow since so much of the time is spent letting glue dry between applications. But fear not, things are progressing and starting to take shape. So without dragging this out, let's take a look at what I was able to accomplish this past week.

Swamp Board - A Genesis

A couple of weeks ago I announced that my first terrain project for 2014 was to be a swamp themed board. Well, the weather has started to cooperate in Western NY so I started work on the board. The idea behind this board is that I want to create a realistic looking lowlands/swamp that fits a 6x4 table surface but will have modular pieces so that even though the overall shape and layout of the board will always be the same, the modular pieces should have enough variety so that the board as unlimited potential for layouts. So let's see what I got done last week.