We watch the lightning, crack over the *very cheaply made* cane fields and often think that this is Australia!

...kudos to anyone who gets the song reference in the title! ;)

Anyway, this post is a very quick one again about some area terrain I made today.  If you have seen my posts in the 6mm Facebook pages, then this info will be nothing new - but for anyone else, keep on reading!

So being an Aussie on our coastline, a lot of the area up North has Sugar Cane fields... so I was hoping to make a rendition of those as area terrain for some of my battles.  My first attempt was to paint the paint brush bristles in an old brush a deep green, cover them in PVC glue, let dry, then cut and glue to a base.

It... well... it looks better as Elephant Grass/a slosh-pit of greenery haha! Still useful but definitely not the effect I wanted - and much too much work for the result.

Left and above are my original attempt at long grass... "Kind of" works, but I feel I'd be better suited putting some water effects around the base and making it into a swamp!

So I went to my local Bunnings store and found the perfect solution... a Coir floormat on the cheap, and a tin of green paint. Five minutes of brushing on return home, and the results match the best examples I have seen online where they make each canestalk seperately!

These coir floor mats would make great cornfields (green on the bottom with a flecking of yellow over the top ends) burnt cane using a black/grey paint, or wheat with a dash of brown thrown over them...

A much, MUCH better version.  Some earth coloration to the sides of the matt and it will pretty much sort itself out!

You could even do the elephant grass through painting the whole lot a darker green hue than mine.

Eventually I will cut out segments to act as fields, maybe even dig a few patches out and place some paintbrush bristles in there with a wrecked aircraft... maybe a downed helo perhaps???

It's been a long time coming...

M113's being painted up!

...but I am finally back!

The last year has been a bit of a wild ride for me, in the ups and downs of life there has been more "down" than "up" in this case.  However; on the bright side my new study as a Pharmacy student is very enjoyable and I hope I have sorted everything for the first year!

Miniature wise, painting took a solid back seat to getting my head back into the study space, so not as much model work has been done this year than I wanted.  Also still looking for employment here means I have to obviously prioritise the time I have with that over more enjoyable activities!  Nonetheless, I have still managed to do some work up here on the models, and got back into it today!

I have started painting more of my 'Army of Legais' forces.  Legais is another fake nation used in training by the Australian army, a lot of their kit is essentially the Australian Army in Vietnam - so older era Centurion tanks, M113s and a few basic armoured cars.

I updated these designs by incorporating some updated M113's (similar to the Danish PNMK upgrade - a turret with an autocannon on a M113 chassis), upgrading the Centurions to be South African Olifant tanks, and have also included some South African G6 artillery.

This is only a quick update, I will give a more detailed painting guide once I finish this batch! :)

An Olifant halfway through painting, and two already completed!

A more side-on view of the completed models.