As well as developing a participation/demonstration game of DBA for the Arthurian period, Mark has been assembling DBA double based Celt and Early Imperial Roman armies. For the Celts' camp Mark has constructed his version of Stonehenge. I volunteered to build a camp for his Romans. To get away from the generic palisaded camp I decided to construct a camp that showed a Roman marching camp under construction. So what follows is a description of how I went about this. Remember the measurements are for a camp in 25mm scale. Don't forget to check the images if my instructions are not clear to you. As they say "A picture is worth a 1,000 words"!
1. Cut the cork tile in a triangular shape with the two short sides being 150mm long.
2. Next cut a 130mm square from the polystyrene. Take the square and cut it in half along the diagonal. You should now have two triangles. Glue and stack the two triangles and allow to dry overnight. You should have a triangle that is now 20mm thick and it will form the ramparts of the camp.
3. To represent the rampart's slope cut the polystyrene on an angle so that you are left with a flat triangular area that has short sides that measure 60mm in length.
4. Next cut an appropriate number of cocktail sticks to a length of 45mm and push them into the polystyrene, making sure that the pointed end is visible. To bind the polystyrene and the cocktail sticks paint a thick coat of PVA all over the polystyrene and before the glue has had time to dry, cover the PVA with the coarse sand.
5. Allow to dry for about an hour and shake loose any excess sand. Paint a 50/50 water PVA solution over all of the sand and allow to dry overnight.
6. To indicate that the camp was still being constructed I glued some cocktail sticks onto the slope to represent the ramparts that still had to be erected.
7. Next I painted everything, except the cocktail sticks, with Tamiya's Flat Earth and once that was dried I drybrushed it with Citadel's Bleached Bone. The cocktail sticks were base coated with Tamiya's Flat Brown and then progressively drybrushed with Tamiya's Dark Grey and then Light Sea Grey. The final touch was to drybrush the tips of the cocktail sticks with Citadel's Bleached Bone.
6. The final step was to apply the flocking.
