Old, Sun-bleached wooden fencing 

You know how you see some images somewhere and you think 'that would be a good terrain item to have?'. Well I saw a documentary about the people who had refused to leave the Chernobyl region. They lived in old, wooden houses and all the wood was sun-bleached and grey in colour and there were fences everywhere. Lots of high fences creating little courtyards. Well I had that as a source of ispiration and then married it with somebody else's idea about using bamboo place mats as a source of  wooden planks. After searching in charity shops for months I had given up but one day I happened across four table mats of the right proportions and bingo,the idea was back on.

Fabled bamboo placemat

 

The placemat - A bunch of built fences are behind on the left of it. Each mat is made up of lots of strips of bamboo, stuck together on a plastic mesh backing and then lines of sewed stitching clustered together. Those are the horizontal lines you can see. I think this stitching comes out quite well in the final fences. I tried to get most of the stitching to be at a similar height but didn't fret about it as I think the variations add to their rustic nature. It did leave some thinner strips of placemat without stitching and these I made into sections of shorter fence, of two heights.

I used large (6") crafting sticks as bases and then added matches for fence posts and more lengths of craft stick as cross-pieces and a fence top. In order to cover up the plastic mesh I cut a 12" strip of mat and wrapped it round to make a double piece with wooden strips on each side. This made the fences nice and sturdy and gave a better surface to glue the tops onto. Most of the pictures I had seen had some sort of top on the fence, to divert rainwater from soaking into the fence from the top you would imagine. It added to the construction time but that and the lateral strips of wood on top of each matchstick fencepost really give detail to the fences and bring them alive. Quite a bit of wood glue and some judicious clamping later

 Painting involved a bit of trial and error to get the right look before choosing the following recipe: -   

• Grey 'wet-brush' - keeping the coverage light but finishing each piece with brushstrokes along the grain of the planks. 
• Army painter burnt umber wash, making sure to get in the gaps between the planks and into any grain in the bamboo. 
• Then a very light, almost white-grey drybrush highlight
• Occasional touchups of more umber wash and re-applied highlight to fix errors.
• The bases where painted with Wilder Russian Mud textured paint and then drybrushed Vallejo US Army Tan to add depth and then Vallejo Khaki for the final highlight. The dust-grime staining at the bottoms of the fences is as a judicial accident of drybrushing the Tan where the brush edge rubbed against the fence! That on top of previous planned extra burnt umber washes at the fence bottom and either side of both the stitching and the lateral slats. 
  

I added grass tufts, bits of bark 'rock' painted black and drybrushed grey and other bits of detritus. Got the birch seed leaf idea from an article I read a couple of weeks ago. 

Also shown are some sections of shorter fence and a wooden door plus frame. I made a few of those to allow figures to pass through the fences. I also did a couple of large gate entrance pieces which you can see below.

I ended up doing quite a few fences!

I was quite pleased with how these came out. Just need to get some wooden houses done now and I have ideas about those.