Building the Old West

Our town got bigger and is now sporting an actual livery and associated corral.  A fairly big structure with two stories, multiple doors and lots of story potential and hiding places.

The big open doors aren’t actually supposed to be open. They accidentally got punched out during assembly so now I need to figure out what to do.  Glue them back in, open or closed?  And what about the doors on the other end?

Sensing a business opportunity Mr. Wiley & Sons have set up shop in our town. I suspect business will be good.

I painted up some Native Americans using Great Escape Games box of Renegade Indians.  One of the figures is wearing an army coat with corporal stripes so I’ll probably add him to the cavalry posse as a Scout.

Indian Scouts had always been an informal part of the US Army but in 1866 the War Department officially authorized them. Initially issued Civil War era surplus they would eventually get their own uniforms and branch of service insignia.  The insignia was a pair of crossed arrows. This insignia was later adopted by Special Forces.

I decided to fancy up the existing hills while working on even more ridges, hills and mesas.  I used some PVA glue and sand on the flat horizontal surfaces to add some interest. I then gave everything a drybrush of Army Painter Skeleton Bone. I then glued some foam tufts to act as foilage.

I’ve been thinking about adding some door frames to the jail for awhile now. I finally got around to using some leftover MDF sprues to make two door frames. Once I cut them to size I glued them together in the proper shape, primed and then painted them.

It’s time to get out of town and add some wilderness terrain to the mix. Forests and mesas seem like a good idea.

I didn’t take a lot of photos of the forests but I had some Sarissa kits that I built up. Their kits just give a footprint for the area terrain and various sized bases from 25mm up to 50mm. Once assembled I used super glue to fix some plastic tree bases onto the MDF bases.  I then used some acrylic green primer from the hardware store on everything.  Once dry I used PVA glue and used some Woodland Scenics flock from a shaker bottle. Once that dried I shook off the excess and recycled that. Then I used water downed PVA in a spray bottle to help seal it in place. With that done I popped the trees back into their plastic bases.  The trees are also Woodland Scenics and are between 7 and 8 inches tall. They’ll be used for multiple game systems but the height was specifically chosen for Dropzone Commander as forests are a defat8 inches tall regardless of the size of the models.