Pocket Panzers

  Over the last week or two, I've been working on sprucing up this 1/72 scale Russian izba by Pegasus to add to my rural Russian terrain. This is a plastic multipart kit with some nice textures on the wood that make for great drybrushing detail. I was very cautious of the scale - sometimes 28mm/1/56 scale buildings can be rather small, let alone 1/72 scale. Here are some Warlord plastic Soviets for scale. If you look too close, it seems a little off, but I think it'll do just fine. I think it's believable that a very rural building might not have large and lavish doors and windows. The walls go together very nicely. The roof is a little more complicated - it's meant to sort of hook into the walls and it's quite snug. I ended up modifying it quite a lot to make it easily removable. The central beam is also not terribly sturdy, in my opinion. I set about tinkering and modifying it to fit my needs, starting by filling the gaps in the side walls left by the assembly. A ...

  In my ongoing quest to flesh out my terrain collection, I tried out a method for making rivers that I saw from a guy named Matt Harvey on Facebook. I put my own spin on it, but the idea is essentially his and I am grateful for the inspiration! The key element here is a thin sheet of flexible transparent plastic. I don't think it would have to be transparent, but it helps. Harvey used stencil templates, I used lamination sheets. Cut the shapes you want from the sheets - 12 inch and 6 inch segments would be ideal, I think, but because of the 8.5x11 size of these sheets it made the most sense to do 10-inch lengths. I choose approximately 5 inches wide, as that seems to present a significant obstacle to 1/56 scale vehicles while also not taking up too much table space. I also cut some curves, which ended up fairly irregular. I don't really think 90-degree river bends look right, so I tried to avoid them. I used hot glue to build up the height of the riverbanks. I'm not sure y...

  This week, I've been working on getting some winter forests done to flesh out my terrain collection. I already have some regular summer pine trees and some small orchard trees, but I wanted something purpose-built for winter-y games, seeing as my main interest is the eastern front. To that end, I just finished up 12 bases of winter pine trees and five standalone pines, as well as five bases and five single deciduous trees. This should give me enough to cover a decent section of tabletop. I've chosen group basing for my trees because the idea of making a forest from single trees sounds exhausting. The best option, I think, would be large bases with removable trees, but then you run into the problem of dozens of single trees again, and storage of larger bases could be a pain. So I settled on clusters of three to four trees on a single base that can give the impression of a thickly forested area while leaving spots to place troops. The large bases also prevents careless players ...