Terrain time !

With Roll Call and Patras both coming up in the next couple of weeks, a man's mind turns to what things are possible to do on a wet Bank Holiday Monday with 2mm mdf, some builders sand, glue and a tin of Rustin's Wood Dye (sometimes known as "Wood Stain" .. presumably if the marketing department don't get to it first).

And.... the answer is a 25mm ADLG area of brushy ground, and a 15mm ADLG marsh.

Very simple construction indeed - the base is simply 2mm MDF sheet, cut square and then the corners trimmed off to make it a tad irregular.   The whole thing is then sprayed dark green (a cammo green spray from Halfords wouldyabelieveit!)

Wood glue is then smeared on where you want the "land" to be, spread about with a knackered brush and then builders sand is poured on top. Leave it to dry for a little while, and then stain the sand areas by roughly painting on Rustins Wood Stain (or similar).

Once that had dried thoroughly (and in a well ventilated place as it kinda stinks), gloss varnish the "green" bits of murky water, and add some grass and grass tufts to the thing to set it all off.

I'm sure there are cleverer ways of doing this, but I'm quite happy with this as the fruits of my own rather half-hearted labours...

A larger area of "brushy ground" is basically the same idea but the base colour here is just the natural colour of the 2mm MDF (no spray), and the whole thing has been painted in Wood Stain, left to dry and then gently drybrushed. 

If you paint it, the wood stain doesn't really sink in - I have however done "lighter" spray version of these in the past, such as for the baseplate to the Samurai Village.

While I was in a terrain-making mood, I also rebased some of my collection of palm trees onto larger, multiple bases.

This has become my go-to technique for trees, having given up on single-based ones as hey fall over  - although I may be over-egging it a little to describe putting 2-3 trees on one base as a "technique"(?).

These are palm tree cake decorations - they have the twin advantages of being cheap, and very flexible so they won't break if you drop them or squish them in a tin for transit.