John looking forward to pics.
Zokissma, the base is far from finished at the moment but what I did/will do is:
The board is MDF to which I added some Pine moulding for the decorated edge. It is also good to give you the edge to contain the groundwork.
The ground work is casting Plaster (Plaster of Paris) mixed with cheap black and dark brown artists acryllic paint - I do this to prevent unsighlty white spots if the base is chipped. Before the plaster sets I just push it around with my fingers to get a nice slightly undulating ground effect, and to build up the area the hedgerow will be. Then I sprinkle different sizes of cat litter (mainly smaller pieces) and fine sand over the base, pushing the cat litter in a little as real rock does not sit up above the surface.
I let that set up for a bit then I drapped cling film (Plastic food wrap) over the base and pressed various tread patterns in the road using old models, spare track lengths and wheels from trucks, etc, finally finishing with the tread pattern from the centaur. The cling film prevents plaster sticking in the tread links and from being pulled off the base when you remove the vehicle. It is thin enough to ensure that good definition in the tread pattern is retained. Just remove it before the plaster fully hardens.
When completely dry I then, using a 50/50 mix of white glue and water in a cheap garden spray bottle (the kind a hairdresser uses to wet down your her when they cut it works well), mist sprayed the whole base with glue mix to make sure the sand, etc is held down, and then sprinkled static grass over that.
When dry the dirt track was sprayed in various earthy colours (for Normandy the soil is a light pinky brown). I used Tamiya Matt Earth first and covered the whole base, then I mixed a little Desert Yellow into to that and mist coated, lightened that with the yellow again, and then a very patchy mist coat with a little white added to the earth/yellow mix.
The static grass was sprayed various green colours, the Normandy grasses are a very bright green as you can see from this pic, the inspiration for the base:
.
Then the rocks were painted Panzer gray, and finally the whole road and rocks were dry brushed with Humbrol matt earth lightened with trainer yellow to blend it together. The rock in Normandy is almost a slate colour and the slight contrast looks great. This is a pic that I lifted from another Forum showing what I mean, hope they do not mind:
I prefer to keep my bases small, so a large hedgerow was out of the question.I decided to just hint at the hedge by keeping the foliage low like in the first pic. First I drilled some holes and glued in two fence posts (real tree twig sections) and clumps of Woodland Scenics straw in place, these to represent the trunks and branches of the hedge plants (don't need to be fussy because most of that will be covered up. On top of that I glued pieces of Woodland Scenics 'Foliage'. This is designed to be glued to their tree trunks, but is great for what I want. It is a stringy kind of mat that has a foam like material glued to it. You can pull the stuff apart to look like clumps of leaves on branches. Anyway, I glued these clumps over the straw, making sure they hung to the ground , then added a couple more layers over that. You can see through parts into the layers underneath - quite effective. This stuff is a uniform colour, so I will be spraying that in different green colours to finish it. I will also add little drops of Yellow paint to the ends of some of the upright static grass beside the road, to represent the flower heads in the pic- don't know if they bloom in June, but what the hey, the contrast breaks up the plainness of the base. I will probably add a broken crate and some other bits along the roadside to add some interest.
When it is finished I will post some closer pics.
Keep up the good work all.