My plan after Historicon was to get straight into working on my Pavia 1525 project for next year’s Historicon. However, at the show I purchased a number of buildings from the Miniature Building Authority’s Shanty Town range. I then supplemented these with some after show purchases. These buildings were so good that I just couldn’t leave them unpainted, but I was aware that I really needed to get back to the Italian Wars project. I therefore set myself six weeks to complete this new endeavor – Haiti, the six week project.
Scope of project
I already had some parts of the project. I had seven Humvees painted along with all the US Marine infantry from my Afghanistan project. I also had all the jungle terrain that I needed from my modern Japan v China Senkaku islands project. I also have a lot of 28mm scatter terrain from various projects and a very nice desert terrain mat. This random collection gave me a good base from which to start. What I needed to complete was:
- Painting about 70 Haitian paramilitary figures.
- Painting about ten to twelve buildings, including detailing the insides.
- Building and painting five more Humvees.
- Preparing the terrain mat.
- Completing scatter terrain around the buildings.
The race was on.
The terrain mat.
A lot of the inspiration for the project came from someone who goes by the handle Garb3n on TMP. I encourage you to look at his work on TMP. Although I don’t know him, I stole some of his ideas shamelessly. He had two ideas on his “Jagged Alliance” modern game that I really liked. The first was using a desert terrain mat as the base layer (for the roads) and then adding cut out green terrain mats on top of it to represent the other areas. This idea gave a lot of depth to the base terrain.
The second idea that I really liked was that each of his buildings was put on its own base. This method of construction had two advantages. The first was that each building could have its own vegetation and scatter terrain fixed to the base allowing a level of super detailing that would not otherwise be achievable. The second advantage was that it allowed the terrain to be deployed very quickly at a show. The whole terrain was set up in less than 15 minutes.
Overall I really like the look of the table and it is great to be able to set up and take down the table very quickly, as most of my tables normally take hours.
The Buildings
As I mentioned in a previous post, I chose Haiti 2004 as the theme for the project as it is a very colorful location to model. Also, I chose it as I have never seen modern Haiti done as a war-game and I like to do unusual subjects.
I tried to make all of the buildings colorful without being garish. All of the colors were copied from photos of actual buildings in Haiti to ensure realism.
Also the signs were taken from photos and were made into decals using decal paper and my printer. Using real signs again added to the realism and capturing the feel of the location.
I also tied to detail the insides of the buildings. At the moment I do not have photos of the insides, but I will do a future post with some new photos.
A video overview
Here is a short video showing the whole table with some close ups.
Final thoughts
Although I had a number of significant elements of this project available from other projects, there was still a lot to do. This project shows what is able to be completed in a relatively short amount of time. Haiti, the six week project was completed on time and I was very pleased with the results. Hopefully it provides some inspiration to someone to push through and complete a project. I will be running a game at Barrage in two weeks time using this project.