Sluys terrain pieces

In April, while playing Sluys with Dave, Mark and Joe, we chatted about the table for the game and how I might spice it up.  Let's face it, there was a naval game-never an eye catcher, in a big roadstead with lots of land, and all the pieces were made of felt.  Based on my illustration of the area, in living color in Fighting Techniques of Medieval Warfare (Matthew Bennet, et. al).  The picture shows the land area, the river estuary, headland and island.  In the illustration there are four small villages forest covering the rest of the area.

Bare felt terrain from March.  Lots of open space

I started out by thinking about the villages.  We're talking about the 14th century, and all I could imagine was that each little village probably had a church with a number of houses and other folks living in the surrounding area.  To keep it simple, I decided to make structures out of square wooden dowels available in the craft department at Michael's.  I cut them in a couple of different sizes and shaped their roofs with a Dremel sanding tool.  I painted them a brown and the roofs a yellow brown for thatch.  Each church I made pretty much the same on a much later model-but using my 28mm Miniature Building Authority church as an example.  The structure is longer with a bell tower.  I kept the painting deliberately simple

One of the four villages made with wooden blocks and somewhat shaped Litko bases.

 Trees were a bit more of a challenge.  I had an unopened bag of small tree armatures from Woodland Scenics.  The question was:  what to do with them?  It thought seriously about individual trees mounted on washers for weight.  I thought I'd just be picking up a bunch of trees all through the game.  So, I cut up some sheet styrene for bases, and applied some acrylic modeling paste from Liquitex that was tinted with Ceramcoat spice brown. Then I just squished the trees right into the paste and let dry for a couple of hours.  I wish I had more sheet styrene because I could probably use some more clumps, like twice as many as I have.  Hopefully it will look a bit more than a few clumps of trees.

One of the larger tree bases

Cadzand Island with trees and village.  Yeah, still seems bare to me too.