Bulging Out All Over part 2; Ice Follies

     My Battle of the Bulge froth has continued...erm...frothing, bubbling over like the head on an inexpertly poured though cool and refreshing pint of pale ale (other beers, indeed other drinks are available but since this is my blog I'm going with a pale ale..cheers! 😉🍺) and has been mostly successful....mostly.

    Since my last post I continued to winterize my other terrain pieces including two ruined log houses from Hovels 25mm range of resin buildings. I had based them on some hard board, coated them with a mix of Sandtex paint, PVA glue and some scattered material from Javis, namely Heather mix, thinking this would give me a good base to work on. Once it had dried I then added a coat of PVA glue for good measure and left that to dry for a few days (see, I'm learning already) before going back to it and adding fallen timbers and small resin craters to break up the bases a bit. I then added the snow paste as recommended in the Setting The Scene book; all looked good, very good indeed so, once again, I left it to one side to dry thoroughly and made my weary way to beddy-byes, full of happy thoughts, and snuggled down for a good nights sleep.

    I awoke bright eyed and bushy tailed, and with a keen sense of anticipation, entered the painting den to find this....Aaaargh!! That bloody Heather mix had bled through!! My bright eyed-ness and bushy tailed-ness deserted me in an instant and I gave vent to much swearing and foul language..

Javis Scenics Heather mix;😁yes folks, it's bleeding awful!!  

    To say I was annoyed would be to put it mildly. Whilst I was at work that day I considered my options and, being generally a lazy type I decided to coat it with more PVA, this time neat, and then cover it with a mix of filler, PVA glue and white paint. Which I did. And i left it to dry. And it did. And it worked. Thank fu...goodness...

     ...or so it seemed. It occurred to me that the "snow" looked a trifle plain, untextured if you catch my drift, so I gave the bases another coat of white glue and sieved some snow flock onto them and, after leaving once more to dry overnight and retiring to beddy-byes I once more slept the sleep of the innocent. Next morning I was less bright eyed etc etc and with justification as, as sure as pooh is brown and stinky, that flipping Heather Mix had came back to haunt me once again!! Heavens above, I thought...or something like that. So back to the drawing board. In some desperation I gave the "snow" a coat of white paint and then coated both bases with Vallejo Ground Texture Snow and put them to one side and prayed.

Looking good....at long flipping last. One of the log cabins on the
table and looking rather spiffing...finally

      And all was well that ended well, at least in this particular case. No seepage nor bleeding and breaking of hearts. As for the fences, which had also suffered from bleeding or seepage, I decided not to risk any more heart ache like I had suffered with the log cabins and gave them a good scrub in warm water and scraped of all the basing material. I'll revisit them soon as I had other more pressing matters at hand.

Scrubbed and scraped back to the wood...well, plastic

     I added another piece of scatter terrain in the shape of a wrecked German truck. I have had this for a while, it's one of those Trucks Of Yesteryear things that is vaguely in scale or as near as damn it. I had made a poor attempt at giving it a fire damaged look and though I might as well cover it with snow to hide my feeble efforts. Once session of snow flocking later I got this result. Fortunately it didn't suffer from seepage. 

     I then turned my attention to my US force. I managed to get all the painted figures bases wintereized enough to make them look the part.I painted the majority of them to look like they were wearing gloves and added some snow flock to a few of armoured vehicles; enough for a game that we, Rich and I, managed to fit in.

The US force done, well most of them. I have more to put
together and paint but for the moment I ma well served in
infantry and armour.

     So for the moment I have a decent amount of winterized terrain. I plan to get a winter mat and some some winter Fir trees etc but as we will be playing our Bulge games at Richie's they can wait.

It has been a learning exercise, putting this terrain together. Pat Smith's book, Setting The Scene continues to inspire and there's more in it that I want to copy it's just a case of factoring it in to my hobby schedule. In the meantime, check my next post for plentiful pictures of our winter table.

Pip pip,

Jimbob