Retro Monday #7: Tank Trap Tutorial

Another blast from the past here. It's beginning to look as though the most popular posts cluster in 2013. Let's see if we can change that - and not just with the help of these strange Russian robots that keep skewing the visitor counts!

Native huts: Part 2 - painting

Happily, the solution I came up with of cutting the towel into circles worked pretty well. I'm not quite happy with the droop on the lowest circle, but I can bear it. I undercoated everything with some Halford's brown gloss spray paint. I think the aforementioned article in Wargames Illustrated #350 notes the irritation of trying to paint a base colour onto towel by hand! With the roofs, I went for a golden-orange range of tones for the straw, usually doing some drybrushing downward, but also sweeping around, too. For the walls I stippled on a span of dirty creams and browns, suggestive of the natural appearance of the materials. I was cognisant of how the bricks in my house are of a wide variety of colours. Having finished the four, I realised I could have saved myself a spot of bother with the roofs by using (vegan) yoghurt pots. D'oh! That said, it means the easy little things should be even easier to replicate.

As an aside, you can see upside down in that last photo I have used a cardboard tube of Glen Somethingorother. It's Aldi's attempt at a single malt, and is everything you would expect a single malt priced £11.49 to be. I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. That said, although it is an abomination as a single malt, it's better than something like Jack Daniel's or Bell's when used in a cocktail, and vastly cheaper than those overpriced tipples, so I may yet buy it again provided it's going into something where I can't taste it. Don't buy it for anyone who likes single malts unless they have a bad case of the flu, and can't taste anything. ;) It is not the amber nectar in the glass on the desk in the background. I think that was some Laphroaig.

Native huts: Part 1 - construction

After seeing a terrain tutorial in Wargames Illustrated #350 on making huts I was inspired to knock up a few huts. They were so easy I may make a load more. That said, I did run into a problem, as I shall relate. Anyway, I took some circular containers, marked them and cut them to the right size. The photos are pretty self-explanatory. I started using foamcard to make the roofs, and then realised I could just as well use some scrap card and foam I had lying about. I daubed on the walls a mix of paint, filler, sand and PVA. Once the elements were dry, I smoothed the edges with a knife, and squirted mastic on them to further smooth out the lines. Then I started gluing strips of towel on to stand in for straw. And here is where it went a bit wrong. As you can see in the final photo, the roof looks all kinds of wrong. And you can see what I decided to do about it: cut out circles of towel rather than strips. As you'll see in Part 2, they look much better.

Retro Monday #6: Terrain Tutorial: Ruined multi-level urban building

A terrain tutorial from 2013 for you today.