A Walk In The Park

A pleasant sunny day in the city park.

I'm finding frustratingly little time for the blog over the last few weeks (as the paltry post count on the right points out). But I haven't been entirely idle out with this sphere.

In preparation for a parkland battle in the "In Her Majesty's Name" Campaign I've been getting my green [flock] fingers dirty.

2 chaps spar under the enthusiastic tutoring of their pugilistic mentor.

Some square thick card squares from a boardgame make this modular. The basic grass areas are just painted green and green flocked.

 The flower beds start with the card painted brown and a green border before flocking with the relevant colour. The hedges are tall hedges from Javis scenics. The flowers are railway scenics sourced on ebay, and I picked up the trees cheap in a trade show bargain bin. All the topiary and flora are hot glued in place.

The fountain and park benches are an mdf kit from TT Combat. I had a few problems trying to decide what colours to paint the fountain and how to deal with the Lion motif on the column. After a few false starts I just defaulted back to the standard drybrushed grey stone routine. I bit boring, but does come up quite well and is probably all the more flexible for it. I resisted adding any leaf litter of water effects not only just to move on, but these can be added a a later date if I feel the need to.

An additional part to this project was to repaint a scratch built wall I'd procured from ebay many, many moons ago. It was quite a bright yellow with red tiles when I bought it (maybe for a table set in warmer climates?), but I really wanted to tone it down a bit. The walls surface was given a coat of household emulsion with a few washes and a highlight, whilst the tiles were given a coat of craft burnt sienna with the same treatment. I also brightened up the plant growth by randomly dabbing on some green sap paint.

Once on the table the set up looks OK. If I was to do it again I wouldn't try to run the box hedging continuously round the formal border. The Javis hedging has the annoying tendency to lean and buckle (one of the reasons I didn't use it for its original role as 15mm hedging), but cutting it into shorter straight lengths with maybe a post at each end may be the way to go. I also tried keeping it in place with small skewer points glued to the board. Don't bother with this as the hedge foam is to dense to get jabbed in this way. Also I'm not sure if the open areas need another application of flock, but that is easily remedied in the future.

There are further additions which would be nice, but just not now. I have saved one card base to make a pond. I also have the inkling to turn one of the existing open areas into a croquet lawn. A proper wall boundary would be good as well - just like with one War Bases has recently released. Sarissa Precision also do a rather spiffy bandstand. There are a few other bits and bobs as well.

But the main thing is it's up and running now!