Catching up on things done in 2011: Jungle Terrain

Having to move house again in the autumn, I realised that I seemed to have even more boxes of 'stuff' hanging around, acquired, scounged or saved to 'make' things than I had figures! This included a lot of things for making terrain, including some acquarium plants for making up some jungle terrain. I'm quite close to finishing both Japanese and Australian/Commonwealth armies for Rapid Fire/Cross Fire (and also have US Marines too) and also acquired the old Esci Vietnam War figures (now Revell and Italeri re-issues) last year, plus I'm hoping to make getting all my Darkest Africa stuff my 'big project' for this year. All need plenty of jungle, so among the things I decided to try and 'blitz' ahead of my house move was the jungle.

I had a sheet of 4mm MDF and got to work with a jigsaw cutting out lots of shapes for this and other stuff, plastered them with a generous amount of PVA glue and then my trusty rough sand, and using a variety of acquarium plants acquired from Pets at Home got sticking them on with a hot glue gun. I've finished some off with a few twigs to represent fallen logs and some tea leaves - dried out again or not used in the first place, which was a tip I picked up on another blog and makes passable leaf litter. Both regular brown and green Chinese tea works well for this, and I used a combination of both.

I started with large 'stands' which are handy for putting down a couple to represent a reasonable sized area, but I also went on to try out basing them on some smaller bases and even coins. I found a variety of different sizes bases worked well for covering a bigger area. As the top photo shows a single A4 box when closely packed for storage can be spread out to cover about 4 feet by 2 feet and still look like dense jungle. It also looks even better when you add add palm trees (more 'island look') or just normal model trees (more 'rainforesty look') or both - sorry I didn't have these to hand when I took these shots-and doing so also increases the table coverage you can get from this much jungle.

In the event I probably only got half or less of what I wanted to get done completed, but this was largely down to running out of storage boxes which I thought I'd ordered in generous enough quantities but obviously not! I've got plenty more plants and have done another tray of bases already so, I can whip up some more when I've got more storage boxes.

I've added by 20mm Aussies to give a sense of scale, but it looks good with 28mm too.

WW2 Japanese

Bashing through several WW2 armies for Rapid Fire late 2009/early 2010 meglomania took over in the Cavalier wargames show in 2010, and I acquired a couple of boxes of Waterloo 1815 Japanese and a bag of old Airfix Japanese too from the Harfield's stand. Having finally finished the Eastern front forces in March of that year, WW2 fatigue overcame me, but by the end of the year, I was able to get the Japs out of the cupboard. After the enormous headache of trying to assemble all the vehicles to fill a Rapid Fire order of battle for a German, Russian, American or late war British army, I was quite looking forward to tackling an army with mainly infantry, which could borrow trucks from there German allies, and where a few light tanks and artillery pieces, and perhaps a plane or two would be 'the icing on the cake' rather than essential.

The main task was researching uniforms, which mainly revealed lack of much consensus on uniform colours. The basic colour was pea green, which often faded badly, and was apparently substituted for a light khaki in 'tropical' areas. All of this research led me to conclude: go for a colour that looks nice! I ended up mixing some green paint I used for basing with some buff paint I use for WW2 German tanks and washing the figure at the end with a brown wash. Seemed to work. You can judge for yourself from the pics.

I finished painting well over a hundred figures last winter. The pleasant surprise was how good the Airfix figs looked when painted properly. These must have had a thousand bad paint jobs and lain around unpainted or with chipped paint in thousands of play boxes, which is how a lot of us think of them, but this figure set sculpted back in the early 1970s actually stands the test of time and painted up they looked as good as the Waterloo 1815 figures released a year or so ago. The Waterloo 1815 box is crammed with goodies like HMGs, knee mortars, radio operators and flame throwers, so many in fact, I was glad of the Airfix to make sure I had enough riflemen. I've not including any of the Heavy Weapons in the shots, but barring a few extra 'ammunition carriers' I make up by trimming off weapons, so that under Rapid Fire rules I have enough weapons crew, virtually everything is painted up, if not varnished and based.

My chief innovation for this project was basing. As I'm sure I have bored Steve to death about already, basing for me has become something of a minor obscession, having completely ignored its importance for most of the time I've been painting figures. If you collect 20mm plastics in wargaming circles you develop something of an 'inferiority complex'. 15mm gamers smile and tell you big figures and vehicles like that are 'oversized for the table', while 28mm 'metal snobs' say, "gosh aren't they small, how do you paint those?" So to counter this, I am always striving to make 20mm plastics look as good as I can on the table. You can only go so far, by painting, and when I ran my online shop and took a professional interest in painted figures, I started to notice a 'well-painted' figure was usually a 'well-based figure', and a pretty averagely painted figure can look great with good basing. I started to notice the difference when I worked a bit harder on the look of the bases for my DBA elements. When I switched back to painting WW2 figures, I had based them on 5 peseta coins I had from when I lived in Spain. Smaller than 1p coins, they 'did the job' but I noticed that they seemed to 'diminish' the figure. I have variously experimented with 2p coins, but for WW2 I initially fielded by German and Russian armies on 5 peseta coins. I decided that it didn't do them justice, so started to study the brillantly well painted figures in the Rapid Fire books, noting the common convention of basing quite a few two-to-a-base on generously sized and well-terrained bases. I therefore, left my figures on peseta coins, for extra weight, but stuck them on larger card bases, which I then terrained with rough sand and also normal static grass.

For the Japs, I've gone one step further and to a further extreme. I want to make up some Jungle Terrain, for these boys, and bought a bunch of acquarium plastic ferns etc. and having so much, put a few sprigs on the base of the figures.

Although I principally intend to use Rapid Fire rules, I really used to enjoy 'Crossfire' rules too at my last club, which is a particularly good simulation of 'company level' infantry combat across dense terrain. This works especially well for jungle fighting. Most 'Crossfire' players I've come across use 15mm figures, but there is not as such any reason that 20mm figures don't work. Crossfire, does, however, mainly use 'element' basing, the size of an element not being fixed, and it can represent a squad/section or a platoon or even a company. After playing around I thought it would do no harm to base a few dozen figures on three figure bases, which could still be used for Rapid Fire, but looked the part as a 'Crossfire' element.

These looked particularly good with 'heavy terrain', but judge for yourself....assuming you can find the figure in all that foliage, of course! I haven't ruled out adding more 'tufts' and such 'high-end' basing accessories to these bases, despite my cheapskate nature.

Unfortunately one of the 'downsides' of using such generous basing, is that the army rapidly grew to require more storage boxes, which I had by this stage just run out of! The final pic is the full force, half based for now, until I have somewhere to store them all.