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    Too lazy to run a game tonight I had spent the evening sipping bourbon and talking politics with the Trunkmonkey and was in a fine, softly buzzed, mood when he left. Not ready for bed, but not really fit for serious work, I began thinking that I needed an earthwork to go with my 15mm TYW figures. I flipped through a couple of books on the period and it occurred to me that they were prone to building some pretty fancy earthworks. Of course this caused me to get out Proxxie and some Styrofoam.........

 

Proxxie in all his low-tech glory!

         One thing that really stood out about the illustrations is that dirt is so much less precise than stone and the various fortifications all looked rather rounded and soft. I hoped to emulate a bit of this by cutting everything freehand to avoid that laser-straight edge . But first I had to design a fort that would hold the rather large bases that the Tercio rules require. This brought about a fort with an interior space no less than 12cm x 12cm with bastions that could hold a cannon based on a 4cm square. After a bit of cogitation and some more bourbon this was what I had;

 

military engineers the world over are spinning in their graves right now

 

but I stuck to my guns and cut the fort free from the graphic mess that defined it

 

with troops in it it doesn't look too bad,

we will have to see what a base and some sand will do for its appearance

 

well, this is what it looks like with a bit of wallboard compound filling in the gaps

 

and this is what it looks like with a coat of sand and a garrison of cut-throat pirates

 

the dimensions of the bases used in the Tercio rules allows me to

 garrison the earthwork with either four companies or two battalions 

plus four cannon of various sizes

 

another side project, while waiting for glue to dry on the earthwork

 I picked up some bits of scrap and made a couple of gun battery positions 

first a coat of sand......

 

.....then some coffee-colored stain to make it look more like earth

 

a light drybrush with medium brown

 

an even lighter drybrush with bright yellow

 

two gun batteries ready to lay siege to an unwary fortress (or earthwork)

 

the pirates seem to like them

 

the battery position can mount two single guns or one "large" battery

 

having let the earlier ground effects dry I proceeded to add 

the soil effects and vegetation over the rest of the board

 

then the earthwork got a drybrushing with Honey Brown (from the Americana paint range)

 

this was followed by a very light drybrushing of pale tan 

as you can see there has been a slight amount of warping of the base, 

for further projects I will most likely use MDF instead of matte board to avoid this issue