Building The Sets...

Okay, so originally the plan was to just do photos of soldiers in the field of battle, maybe a D-Day landing or two, requiring some sand or water, but it seems to have mushroomed slightly. I now have photos of all sorts of places from beaches to trenches via ruined towns and country roads, passing a few mountains, forests and jungles on the way! Of course all this means that I need props as well as my soldiers...

My project for the tail end of this week therefore is set building. I am now armed with foam core board for the buildings, but I really need to thank scalescenes.com which allowed me to download a selection of different brick finishes for the buildings - a quick stop at the colour laser printer, and I'm set with buildings from Northern Germany to North Africa! They do do whole building kits too, but unfortunately their scales are far too small for the size of my toy soldiers :o(

Next part is going to be tree building. Again I've found that model trees are too small for my soldiers, so I've armed myself with some plant sticks from B&Q, some mod-roc to add the bark, some wire to make an armature for the branches, and some foam to make the foliage. It seemed that a lot of the model trees were made with chips of foam sprayed green and glued to an armature, so I figured if it worked for them, then it would for me too! The man that runs the The Foam Centre, on Howard Street in Glasgow, was generous enough to give me a pile of offcuts to try this experiment with, so between that and a cheap £9 blender from Argos to turn it into little bits, I should be churning out foliage in no time. With 2 colours of green spray too, I can even branch out and have 2-tone trees too...

Finally I have beaches, cliffs, aerodromes and more. For the beaches I grabbed a bag of sand at B&Q (okay, grabbed is exaggerating, it was very heavy, I pretty much heaved it off the shelf and then at the other end into the car!), for the cliffs I have some chicken wire, mod-roc and stone plaster, and for the aerodromes I have an Airfix diorama. The rest will be au naturel in gran's back garden with grass, mud and paths (although I might not mention my intention to dig some trenches just yet...)