Terrain for 6mm Wargaming: North African Mountains Part 2

There are lots of photos of the mountains in North Africa, I found this one the most useful as we see the mountains rising out of the desert which for wargaming WWII is the most useful. The important thing for me when painting the terrain is that mountains are pretty close to the colours of the desert plain. From looking at this photo they are quite variable in height. The first ten I made are very similar in height, but I need at least 10 more for gaming so I will keep that in mind.

The first thing to do is to fill in the bases around the cracks. I like to use wood filler, it is much more resilient than spackle or drywall compound, this one is need as it goes on pink and turns beige as it drys.  You can see it dries quickly, but is quite workable. Just wet your spatula and it immediately turns pink again and is soft. I use a brush if I want to smooth the rough edges. It was paintable in 3-4 hours.

I use this cheap acrylic that I get from an Art Shop in large bottles. I start with  Burnt Sienna followed by a very heavy wetbrush of yellow oxide. This is what I have done for the whole project all the bases have been done the same way.

The last step is a light drybrush of white with a small amount of the yellow oxide mixed in.

Here we have the first 10 pieces on a Cigar Box 6" grid desert mat. As you ca see using smaller bases allows one to place curved mountain ranges on a gridded mat. I spread them out here but you could just of easily place them abutting each other. You need about 5 bases for every four 6" grid if you do this. I find this really takes away the board game aspect of using a gridded playing mat.

As you can see the bases for the tanks are quite similar to the mountains. I suppose I could have made the mountains a little higher (they are mountains after all), but there is a point where they become difficult to store. This works for me.

The Cigar Box mat is really quite brilliant, you can barely see the lines. As you can see I have easily fit two 70x45mm bases in the 6" grid with the mountain terrain piece.

Getting very close to getting to try out those rules!

Next up is some towns, which presented a particular challenge but I will save that until my next post.