Normandy back gardens

When I painted the first row of buildings for my Normandy 1944 collection, back in 2018, I wrote that I didn't like that they just sat on the table with none of the things that surround real buildings. I actually started to do something about that soon after but I stalled on how best to do some of the details and the gardens / pavement base sat half-finished in the cupboard for a long time.

The base itself is a piece of MDF with cardboard and filler to compensate for the extremely uneven base of the the resin buildings. I added 'paving slabs' from thin card and made the walls from more MDF with cardboard coping stones. 

I wanted to depict rendered walls with the rendering breaking away in a few small areas. In a break from my previous practice of sticking on rectangles of card to give a brick or stone effect, I dug out small areas of the MDF, filled them with Milliput in which I sculpted the bricks, rendering over the rest of the wall with filler.

Fences and gates are made from 0.5mm plastic with the details scribed in and brushed over with a wire brush to remove the burrs and give a light texture. It turned out that this wasn't enough texture for dry-brushing to work when I came to do the painting and I had to revert to painting them in layers with a fine brush then a final dry-brush along the edges for a top hi-light.

I wanted to include some details that you might expect to see in 1940s wartime, to bring the scene to life. I assume, as in the UK, many people would be trying to supplement their food supplies by growing a few vegetables, keeping chickens or even a pig so I decided to depict these which would require (apart from a pig and some chickens) a chicken coop and pig stye. These aren't based on research into what was actual French practice at that time - just on what looked 'right'. 

I wanted to divide the back gardens with wooden fences but some of these Hovels houses are very narrow so the back gardens would be equally narrow - narrower than my infantry section bases.

This is up one of the perpetual dilemmas of Wargames scenery - including too many details makes them less usable as a game backdrop by making it hard to actually place figures in and among the scenery. 

I also found a (sort of) real-world problem with the pig-stye. To make a lean-to structure against the walls, with a front sufficiently high for a crouching pig-owner to enter required a shallow roof - too shallow for tiles or slates. An obvious solution would be corrugated iron but I was reluctant to buy a whole sheet of Wills or Slaters textured plastic sheet for less than a square inch of roof.

So my progress stalled with the twin problems of gaming usability and making or re-purposing something to represent 1/100 scale corrugated iron.

Eventually I decided to make the main details, including one of the boundary fences as separate pieces that could be moved out of the way when necessary..

The chickens are from Peter Pig. The chicken coop was scratch built from plasticard with sandpaper to represent roofing felt and I made the bucket from an off cut of plastic sprue with a wire handle.

The pig is (appropriately) from Peter Pig, from the same pack as the ones I used in my orchard. I suppose the pig should be fairly covered in mud but I was aiming for eye catching colour contrasts rather than genuine realism. He is probably feeling rather aggrieved as I have failed to provide any drinking water and his food trough is empty. 

I came up with a way of making a representation of corrugated iron sheeting by using the cat's flea comb in a metal-working vice to press the corrugations into pieces of thick aluminium foil cut from a tomato puree tube. 

Originally I was going to do a green house but that proved quite difficult as I didn't have any suitable clear plastic so the third garden had to settle for a cold frame and a couple of raised beds. I'd intended to have some beans growing up the canes but haven't been able to think of a good way of doing that so far. The canes themselves are thin steel wire, with the upright pairs soldered at the top with the cross-piece just glued in place.

I'm pleased with the overall effect and plan more of these extra bits of detail scenery in future. Maybe a  war memorial, roadside calvary, farm cart - that sort of thing. And a green house when I find some suitable clear plastic.