Desertification Pt.1

Desertification Pt.1 

With a few months to go I am being a busy beaver trying to put together terrain.
As its stands, between the club and the local payers we have about four tables worth of terrain.  that leaves a mere 8-9 tables to produce.

My aim is to produce:

• Four tables worth of modular terrain - with set in Wadi and depressions and maybe an Oasis.
• Enough soft sand, rocky areas, old wreckage and shrub and palm tree markers for the additional tables
• Rocky hills and escarpments
• A desert airfield
• repaint the existing "green and brown" hills for the desert.

Obviously this needs to be done on a budget so It's going to be a case of build rather than buy.

The Palm Trees are one of the few things I need to but.  Thankfully E-Bay showed a  few options and I settled on a Chinese supplier netting me 200 trees (70mm high palm trees)for a mere £12.  I also bought some HO scale telegraph poles from the same supplier to add some character to the desert roads and railway.
I'll add the palm trees to an MDF mini base (think how the "battlefield in a box" works).  The telegraph poles will go on tongue depressors ala the European tree lines.  One telegraph pole 6" tongue depressor should give sufficient spacing.

Nothing like a bag of trees and poles to brighten up a work day!

Tree and telegraph pole next to 15 and 28mm DAK!

As you can see, the Telegraph pole is perhaps a touch large for 15mm but there wasn't many options.

The shrubs took a bit of pondering.  My original idea was aquarium plants but it worked out a bit costly.  Whilst strolling through the North Laines in Brighton I passed a store that has sheets of "astro-turf" on sale.  The stuff is akin to what you see in butchers and the like for putting goods on.  £11 bought me a large sheet.

It's about 2000+ clusters!  It's a lot of cutting.

I figure if I cut it into the individual "clusters" then it'll do for the waxy spinly leaf brush you get in Africa.

Cluster versus DAK.

As you can see, it's maybe a touch taller than I'd like.  But it should work fine.

The rocky and sandy areas are fairly straight forward.  Just markers which either sand of ballast glued to them.

My aim is to get these markers done by the first weekend in November to clear the way for doing all the major work - building the modular terrain and airfield.