"Making Spain and Portugal Look Right" Topic

After some very helpful advice and encouragement from 138SquadronRAF, I have been able to make a good caulk-on-cloth terrain mat. For my experiments I have just used flock that I had spare but I am keen to make a couple of mats that I'll use for gaming and as a lot of my gaming is set in the Peninsular War, I wondered if anyone had some good ideas for suitable flock colours that would give a good feel for Spain and Portugal?

Predominant colour in most of Spain and Portugal in summer is brown, not green. North Spain greener – in fact, the area is called 'Green Spain'. Again, though, don't go for vibrant, bright greens, use a mix with yellows and browns like 'meaow'grasslands. Sorry can't download photos from my computer to TMP…

Thank you for the kind words. Glad I could help.

Pretty much as GarrisonMiniatures stated.

Spain has a wide variety of terrain. This can come down to desert reminiscent of the American South West or Northern Mexico. "Spaghetti Westerns" and the original Conan films were made in Spain. The northern portion is greener.

Most of the Osprey series on the Peninsular War battles have contemporary colour photos.

Remember you down have to use just the colour flock as it comes, there will be a tendency to blend colours, I used greens, yellows and browns here:

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For a look you can check out some movies, Battle of the Bulge and Patton were largely filmed in Spain. Many of the Daenerys scenes in Essos in the current GoT series are filmed in Spain as well. Portugal, and here I'm going off memory, was (at least the parts I visited) more wooded and green (but nothing like Northern Europe).

This may help:

Salamanca

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Talavera

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Bailien:

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Why dont use google maps?

Mind though that deforestation wasn't that advanced in early XIXth Century as it was later. Many places that are nowadays devoid of trees would have been forested back then, even if just small copses. Also remember that it is not the same terrain in early spring -usually very rainy between late March to early May- or late Autumm -again most of the rainfall happens between middle October and early November- than in Summer or Winter.

Google Maps have the problem of being accurate only for present day Spain, i.e. a country that has been thoroughly urbanized in the last fifty years. The whole Levantine coast was quite different back in the 1800s (or the 1900s for that matter) from what it is now. Today is heavily urbanized, while then was mostly wild, with some small fishermen villages dispersed along the coast.

I got to round to having a go at making a vaguely suitable one (or at least, more suitable!):

I think it captures a little of the appropriate colour, at least. THanks very much for all of the the helpful advice.

Lived outside of Madrid for two years back in the seventies. Was still very rural back then, and yes everything is brown from May to November. It does green up a little over the "winter" when it rains a lot.