BoB/RCW: White Artillery and some scenery pieces

Louis the camera, got an outing today to take some photos of newly finished scenery pieces, and the second White Russian artillery piece I’d painted:

I still need to get to grips with the technical aspects of the new camera (Louis), but the focus is much better. Lighting remains an issue.

As you can see I replaced the officer for this second artillery piece, with a different one from the Copplestone White Officers pack (BC25). I have a third artillery piece to build which will make a full battery, asnd which will probably be actually deployed only once or twice in my life !

In preparation for my planned Back of Beyond Big Game in June I ordered and started building some scenery pieces. Whilst the Ukriane and parts of the Don are part of ther “Black Earth belt”, other areas are very much more steppe and semi desert regions, and as my BoB figures must also do service in central Asia, Mongolia and Manchuria I use a lighter soil mix for the bases…so obviously as Scenery Boy I need a different set of Trees! for this game…

Again I went for Woodland Scenics trees from Antics, and the scale chart indicates they are 24-32′ high on an O/S scale which is roughly 28mm.

Which looks more realistic for the figures.

The trees will be situated around the buildings on the battlefield, as open steppe of the Don, Kuban and Kalmyk regions is obviously grassland and any trees would be planted around settlements.

Tree ! Tree ! Tree !

As scenery boy I have a lot of trees, and for the upcoming AVBCW Battle of Ledbury that JP & I are organising for the 16th February, I got some more Trees !

Really, How Interesting

Big trees, not any of the titchy ones. As we have 28mm figures they need to be convincingly big. These are for my AVBCW, BoB and AWI projects, and could be used for WHFB too.

The latest acquisitions are pine trees, so several can be put on a single CD scenery base:

(That’s a Copplestone explorer 28mm size figure to give you an idea of their size)

For the larger deciduous trees, there’s one per CD base to help avoid them being knocked over which given their size is a real risk:

The bases have my usual brown flock and static grass on them, with the static grass mostly around the edges: partly to help disrupt the regular circular nature of the CD base; and also because grass does not grow so well under trees as the trees take up all the moisture and block out the sunlight.

The general gaming convention is that if a unit is “in the woods” one or more of their figures are placed on the base, and the rest of the unit are in base to base contact with the scenery base (within reason).

The trees are Woodland Scenics that I buy from Antics, and are 12cm+. They are imported so I often have to do special orders to get them in time for events. They do however look the part. Unsurpisingly, there will be one or two photos of the board set ups, and of the games themselves for next weekend.

On a 6×4 board, a couple of these stands of trees would be imposing. However, as I am attempting to dress two 12×6 boards on the 16th, you need substantially more scenery so I am aiming for half a dozen tree stands for each board at least.