We haven’t got any markers to mark the edges of mortar stonks for our Chain of Command games and recently have been using dice to mark the edges which really just wasn’t doing it for me. As the ‘Operation Martlet’ campaign has just kicked off and I see a lot of barrages happening over the course of it, I decided to try and come up with something to make it look better in the write ups.
So, I grabbed some foam culled from old pan/dish scrubbers (I always keep some handy) and got to work ripping them up into suitable shapes. When you do this for larger ‘scale’ efforts I’ve found that you usually have a flat side so I ended up sticking 2 bits together (with super glue) and then ‘modelling’ them a bit more until you get a suitable shape – I even ended up folding bits and then gluing again or adding small bits that I’d ripped off earlier to add to the shape. The results are then glued onto pennies and once that has dried have at them with some paint. One of things that I like is that where the paint doesn’t take in the foam you get the original yellow colour showing through which adds to the effect somewhat I feel. I’m still mulling over whether to add some bits of ‘dirt’ to the edges using my basing material to show clods of earth flying about and might give one or two another go with some paint but I’m quite happy with them at the moment.
Here’s the results of about an hours work all told – and yes, I stupidly painted the last one a different colour (ran out of glue before making the last one, so did that today and had some German Grey that I needed to use up and didn’t realise just how much darker it was!), but it will do as the ‘ranging shot marker’.
Tracks and Threads 