Now that the madness of getting ready for the show has subsided (and ignoring for a moment the madness of trying to get something on Kickstarter) ... I think I'm done with the extension to the North African piece. The whole thing was supposed to be sparse because (a) it's a desert and (b) I wanted space to be able to add mobile elements and game on it.
Here's one of the trees - trees are hard.

I've also mostly finished basing the two buildings but I'll post about those later. For now I want to concentrate on the whole board. 
​Here's another of the little bedraggled trees though.

Here's a couple of images from across the board.
That poor little sherman's done some work. I've got more photos of it than my children.

For better or worse I have uploaded my first ever video to youtube. Shame about the weird "glitch of blackness" which I'll try and fix. I'm also working on an extension to this board to make an even bigger gaming area. I've done a fair bit so the next few posts will be catching up with where I am with that.

First some more photos of the details. Not much point in hiding the imperfections, but magnification is not always kind. I hope you notice I even went so far as to hang one of the kids sheets in the background. That's classy that is. And I couldn't face moving all the accumulated junk from my desk.

Here's a few shots of the detail. I know what's out there and how amazing some the work you all can produce is, but for me, I'm quite pleased with how this turned out.
The thing with the close ups and slide show format though, is that I can't help but think of this as "diorama porn" and imagine some Barry White  in the back-ground.

Right from the start, I wanted a very arid look this this but I thought it needed a little vegetation. The bits of privet make pretty good trees, gluing bits of green lichen to them is a nightmare though. Superglue was useless - how can the damn stuff stick fingers do efficiently but won't stick anything else. I ended up using tiny amounts of contact cement and a cocktail stick. 

I also think I'm finally happy with the overall colour. I think I'm ready to call this. It's been fun but it's probably time to ease back on the obsession.

Details! I've glued that wall down in sections and added rubble next to the lower sections and gaps (rubble + ruin, as before). I tried to have some sense of narrative in that wall sections near craters were broken or at least damaged. The walls had some washes of brush water and agrax earthshade as well as some nuln oil carefully applied to cracks and along the sides.
I'm continuing to paint the small items, boxes, bits of timber etc. On the right here you can just make out the legs of an upturned, broken table, inside the building, it's sitting on a yellow "rug" made from a piece of patterned tissue. It seemed important at the time...
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I wish the photo below had come out better, I was quite pleased with the little signs.

After reading around a but about Operation Crusader and having a look around North Africa on google maps, I've settled on somewhere south of Tobruk. Hence the signs pointing to Sidi Rezegh and El Adem.

The well's now finished too, except for a bit of vegetation perhaps. The barrels were painted bolt gun metal before two different rust pigments and a dark wash.

And I'm still working on the colour of the whole board, still got that weird greenish-orange, but it is slowly surrendering to multiple layers of very thin wash. I figure that way I can't do anything too catastrophic.

Fairly decisive failure to begin with - too much glue too early. Actually, this is well down the list of failures but pictures of me getting cross with Italeri's wall sections or getting covered in glue probably don't make for great blog posts (I may be wrong, I believe I have established my lack of expertise in these matters).

But I kept trying, there was something quite compulsive about trying to build a dry stone wall in miniature.
In the end; the method I settled on was the following. I don't for a second suggest anyone else should try this - there must be a better way. Or something on the TV.

On the last layer of wall I tried to use smaller pieces and lay them side-by -side to it looked like the wall was in two courses.
​Once the wall was built I dripped watered down PVA all over it. Again using a long needle nozzle to make sure every surface was wetted with glue. Once dry the foil peels off the bottom (mostly) and the walls are fairly robust.

I built various sections, different lengths and heights as I want some parts to be falling down. I also built some wall end sections which I want to put posts into. They got a spray with grey primer first and then I hand painted them with Golem Smeg. But they'll need more painting.

Much like me, if I stay in place too long, buildings in the desert accumulate a good build up of rubbish around the edges. Also a bit of stuff around the bases of the buildings will allow the hiding of any remaining gaps, or anything else I don't like the look of. I applied a PVA + water solution (40/60ish) along the edges of the buildings with a needle nozzle so it doesn't slosh everywhere.

Then I sprinkled the remains of the finer bits of of ballast and sand left over from the rubble-isation (I can event words if I want to). It helped to blow gently towards the buildings so that the material built up in the right places. Then just repeat, I tried to use slightly finer particles towards the end. I think it worked better above, but not so good on the left. On the left I used too coarse a material - not for the first time.

Once dry, I wash over several times with the brush water, sometimes taking a bit out and darkening it if I run out of patience with how long it's taking. I've also started thinking about a few minor pieces, road signs, barrels and boxes, minor trash left lying around.
The sand bags are living dangerously. Little pieces of evil that are a nightmare to trim, don't stack and were clearly created with the sole purpose of making life difficult.

I took the plunge and glued the buildings down. They've had various washes with Agrax Earthshade over the browns and in some of the cracks and several washes of the water from the brush pot which sounds terrible but gives a really good dusty/dirty look to the surfaces with the same pigments I've used for the base and the buildings. So they look a little better.
I'm still working on the surface colours too but now I've got the buildings down it will force me to be more careful and think about whether I need to keep adding colour. Or I'll be here forever.

I'm still not happy with the surface colour in places, too orangey/green and the buildings need to be "blended in" to their surroundings. That means (for me) adding textures to the edges of the buildings so there are no gaps and they look like dust and sand has accumulated around the edges.

So when a building becomes a ruin, all the blown up stuff doesn't just get vapourised, we're talking explosives not phasers. So for my ruined buildings I've used all the waste pieces, fragments and broken chunks. I even cast a couple of extra building parts in plaster then broke them up. All these extra broken pieces need to make up the missing parts of the ruins.

Of course, that also means painting all the rubble as well because that's a lot of exposed broken brick work. It's just a tiny bit possible that I assumed that the white plaster on the walls of these houses was pretty damn resilient and mostly survived the shelling and stayed plaster-white.
I also added a load of course balast mixed with fine and medium and some sand. This all went in a tub with the brown paint mix and got a good stir. I left that to dry and then broke it all up and mixed some of the finer white plaster fragments back in.

All this created a reasonably convincing (from a distance, one eye closed) collection of rubble which I laid out across the building bases. Spent far too long "gardening" this stuff but it seemed fairly important to get right. In most of these ruins the roofs come down, that's a lot of rubble. I so want to make a Flintstone's joke now, but I will remain strong.

Still, living and learning and all that. Here's one of the buildings. It's had a coat of white primer, followed by a coat of Model Air off-white. Then a mix of several brown's and ochres applied to where the plaster has broken off the wall or the interior parts of the wall are otherwise revealed. There's a lot of broken surfaces on a ruined building. I didn't mix the browns really thoroughly, that way I get some variation in tones. 

Some of these buildings are made in clay, others are made in plaster of paris. The fine details are way better in plaster so one a couple I've tried to paint on the rough brick work. It's too small to photo, it looks awesome though - honest, not at all like it was painted by a monkey sat on a washing machine at full spin.

I've also painted the bases inside the houses. A mix of dheneb stone with a bit of brown variation. It's not called dheneb anymore of course, probably "Golem smeg" or something similar. But it's still early days for these, probably going to keep working on them and building up some very thin washes while I wait for other bit's to dry.

I'm not convinced by some of the flat areas, they need breaking up. Also, I need to paint the floors of the buildings a different colour. Other than that I just need to start improving the colour, getting in some variation, shading, etc, oh, and painting the buildings.

All the elements are glued in place now. I may have procrastinated just a little (a lot) about where everything went but the good thing about gluing everything down is that after a while the decision is made for you and you're stuck with it (Dad joke, I'm so sorry). Sprayed everything over again with grey primer. The Halford's one's have a quite rough matte texture which I like. 

The unpainted white bits are where I've had to correct for shrinkage of a base by adding a little extra modelling clay.
The photo on the left's a bit ropey (I refuse to spell ropey without an "e" spell-checker) but I've kept it because it shows the imprint of the walls on the bases. 

I've also put the buildings back in temporarily. The job of painting all those pieces is looming like a big, black loomy thing. I did have fun making the road. A couple of intermediate LEGO cogs on an axle, a smear of sand in a vague road like shape, back an forth with the cogs and a road/track appears. 

So here's some close ups.

Also I keep making these jeffin' rocks whenever I have any spare plaster and I never use them. Here's one on the left, more modelling clay, rocks stuck in and another crater for good measure.
I've tried to line up all the rocky elements along a definite trend. All those years as a geologist are finally paying off.

Let the gluing commence. Before one million different ways of laying this out are explored; I'm going to nail the damn things down or I won't get anywhere. The gluing is easy. Put a tonne of wood glue on the base and smear it out smoothly, slap it on the base board and keep pressing it down until it surrenders and stops curling at the edges. Resistance is futile!

 Here you can see the dark shadows around all the elements. That's a wide smear of glue as it squeezes out from under the edges.
Also, it appears that resistance is not entirely futile. A few of the elements, like the sand bag emplacements don't seem to fit with the layout and they're too curled up. I'm going to keep these as mobile pieces but they'll need flattening out.

Here they are, glued to a piece of plasticard that's taped very flat to my desk. The glue seems to soften the clay a little and it all gets pull flat, and then dries flat - in theory.