Ares Games

Trenches and No-Man's-Land

This is a series of photos of a 'spacer' section I made to go between the 'city' and 'country' Ares mats to represent a trench line. I used a couple of pieces of artist's canvas and some craft paints and had a fun weekend painting it up! The pictures loaded in reverse order, so for the sequence and descriptions, start with the last picture and work backwards...
  1. IMG 0490  This past weekend's furball with Snoopy and two camels against three triplanes.
  2. IMG 0467
  3. IMG 0465  Snoopy and the Red Baron 'dogfighting'...
  4. IMG 0463 (1)  This is Brown's Camel at three pegs' height - to give an idea of the scale of the trench lines.
  5. IMG 0462 (1)  Brown and von Richthofen flying over the 'lines'...
  6. IMG 0460 (1)  Then I added green borders and roads and rivers to match up with the original Ares mats - the colors are close but not quite exact -...
  7. IMG 0459 (1)  Here they are, with some grey/cream edging to soften the hard circle and make it blend into the ground more.
  8. IMG 0458 (1)  Time to add shell holes - I cut off the ends of two different sized brushes - the wooden handle ends - and then used them as 'stamps'...
  9. IMG 0457  The whole slice with the trenches done...
  10. IMG 0456 (1)  It was actually kind of therapeutic - especially with some Pink Floyd playing in the background.
  11. IMG 0455  I did parallel lines initially, and then I went back and added in support trenches and secondary positions...
  12. IMG 0453  Once the darkening is done, I used a fine-tipped black paint marker to draw on the trench lines.
  13. IMG 0452  Now it's time to go back and darken up the area where the trenches are going to be...
  14. IMG 0451  Here's the whole slice of canvas base-coated.
  15. IMG 0450  A wider shot of the same...
  16. IMG 0449  This is an Ares-wide strip of artist's canvas cut 12 inches wide - I have begun painting the basecoat using the colors shown on the plastic...
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