"How to - making walls for the Mediterranean" Topic

As part of my ongoing Crete-themed project, I've written up a guide on how I made dry stone walls on my blog.

You can read about the required materials, tools and techniques here: link

For anyone new to terrain-building, it's a good starter project.

Please leave comments!

Many thanks, Darryl

A proper dry stone wall is far more regular in appearance than those rather scruffy looking walls.

Your "scruffy" walls look fine to me, and your instructions for building them are very useful. Thanks for sharing.

Not only do they look fine, but they look exactly like thousands of stone walls I saw on holiday in Crete two years ago.

Thank you!

Why do so many people on this forum feel the need to sh*t on someone's work?

I see why this forum is slowly degrading.

Nicely done and thanks for the tutorial.

Thanks for taking the time to post the tutorial.

@parttimegamer: Echoing above sentiments, very useful tutorial, thanks for taking the time to write it up and for posting the link here!

The walls look just right for Malta or any Greek island. The "proper" drystone wall shown is of course a much more professional and durable effort, but not likely to be seen in a poor framer's field. Such walls vary greatly in areas of the UK and can instantly be recognised whether from Yorkshire (proper ones they are), the Lake District, Shropshire or Cornwall.

Personally MajorBs comment would not have troubled me. I would rather get some feedback than have my post ignored (especially if I knew I was right after all!)

Actually I cannot see the comment by MajorB as he is on my stifled list. People need to stifle more as there are too many loonies on here.

Now I like those…a lot, brilliant work

Great tutorial, many thanks for sharing this. The look good to me!

Cheers Roger.

As Parttimegamer mentioned too, the walls are part of a complete Crete-themed project (just some of his great work, this on the board surface here) -

link

Working up a custom, thematic treatment aint small beans either.

Looking at his blog progress, and those pics Deadhead posted above, he really knows what he's doing.

Very clever!

It looks very fine.

Maybe is time for this insane project ;)

link

I agree. Major B's stone is Purbeck limestone, Home Counties of England and not what we would see oop North. Let alone on Crete. That island above is real! Not ideal for a glider assault.

I recall that there was a camo scheme used on Malta, that covered the vehicle in black lines to reproduce the stone effect….must hunt for it now!

Took seconds to find loads of pics;

Thanks for all the comments guys. Much appreciated.

The photos that Deadhead has posted above (from 1941 Crete) were what I was trying to model, rather than the nicely dressed stone walls you find in some parts of the UK.

I think that Croatian island project will have to wait…making about 6 feet of wall in 28mm took long enough! lol

For the record stone walls the world over started as clearance cairns, where stones were basically moved out of the area where they'd interfere with ploughing and into the periphery, usually being dumped in rows, or occasionally in heaps where they get mistaken for burial mounds. Obviously mounds of stone were formalised into proper walls when the concept of land division became more significant and also for keeping sheep etc in the same postcode as you left them the night before.

Your walls look very nice by the way.

Thanks for posting, the walls look great and thanks for letting me add to my stifle list!

I do think there is a place for the "scruffy" wall, as not all walls are the same, not even dry stone walls.

But as the photos show, many dry stone walls have quite sharply vertical sides. That is not easily achieved by sprinkling, scattering, or stacking cat litter (or model railroad talus, or whatever material you may choose) onto a surface with some PVA to hold it in place.

In 6mm scale I have used cork sheeting without any covering of glued-on litter or talus. Just plane old cork, with liberal applications of washes and dry-brushing, comes to represent a very nice flat-sided stone wall.

The litter, or in my case talus, can then be used to represent the scattered stones at points where you want a break in the wall.

I expect this would work well at larger scales too, although probably with larger cork sheets. But I have never tried it at any other scale because, well, who needs other scales?

(Ducks and runs for cover behind the nearest stone (cork) wall.)

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

I like them

What are the colours on that Matilda?

We really need some sort of "Tanks Palette" resource akin to Wings Palette, where you can go and browse funky colour schemes.

If I had built a drystone wall like the one below IŽd have got the sack. It breaks one of the basic rules several times.

Airfix Magazine once carried a colour cover picture of a Bofors Gun, possibly with its tow truck, (somewhere in the attic) with this Maltese scheme.

Basically Desert yellow with black lines, but they would soon fade to dark Grey. Google show many examples.

Great stuff Parttimegamer something that is on my list to do.

Pauls Bods: yep that's pretty shoddy, I wouldn't put my name to it, there is a really obvious weakness (almost as if they've filled in an old gateway or damaged section lazily/badly). And I've only played at it (My Mother-in-law used to teach DSW).

Keep up the good work and bravo to the commentators (bar one utter %#@&) for the refreshing internet positivity.

I'm interested, what's wrong with that wall?

Lots of places where the stones are not adequately overlapped – and not at all in some places.

Pauls Bods, BeneathALeadMountain, and uglyfatbloke thank you. I too wondered what was wrong with it never having done drystone. I do have some resin walls, from Alternative-Armies, that look like that but now I will have to go look closely at them to see how the courses are laid

Well I still like the OP's dry stone walls :-)

Basically Desert yellow with black lines, but they would soon fade to dark Grey.

This is from a museum in Valletta .

Exactly!

Delighted the museum has reopened at last! (Got any more pics for a separate topic maybe?)

That's from a Malta FB group .

link

I painted a Matilda for Malta (a game of "what if Operation Herkules had not been canceled?") and it was dark yellow with brown stripes. I got it out of a book with colour plates, which of course I cannot find right now to reference.

A tip: in painting other Malta vehicles later on, I found it much better to paint the dark colour as the base and then fill in the stones with the lighter colour. Much more convincing rendition of a stone wall -- even though that doesn't seem to have been the procedure used for the tank in the photo above! I painted an A-13, at least one carrier and perhaps a staff car with this method.

Awesome article. Such good and simple ideas.

Your comment inspired me to go back to the original article once more. Thanks, aGratefuldeadone, sorry arealdeadone!