A Tale of Two Bridges

Pondering the scenario we were going to use for our next game I realised that, regretably, I appeared to be short a bridge (or two).  I'd already made various river sections and an 'ancient' DMB style bridge, but needed something a bit more modern.  It's all relative.

My first thought was that were going to have an ACW game so I clearly needed a wooden bridge for that.  I made it about 45mm wide in order to accommodate our ACW plastics and in fact most of our other standard WRG basing (i.e. DBM/DBA/DBR).

Construction materials comprised matches stuck on to pieces of cardboard with standard PVA glue, a section of lino for the river and various offcuts of thin card and polystyrene.

Once all glued together, the bridge was thickly undercoated in black acrylic and then drybrushed heavily with dark earth (Revell 82), followed by a lighter dry brushing with Africa brown (Revell 17).  The river banks were painted Africa brown and then coarse shelly sand was added (using PVA), followed by some static grass.

Of course after I'd made this one it was decided that the scenario would instead be a Napoleonic one played out using 20mm plastics and therefore the bridge I'd just made would be too narrow.  So I also made this one which is about 65mm wide.

This was basically the same construction as the matchstick bridge but used wooden lolly-pop sticks instead.  The same painting technique was used which brought out the grain quite well and makes them look like oak planks or something.

Cutting off the rounded ends of the sticks with a pair of stout scissors made the ends a bit uneven with the odd chip-out, which gives it all a bit more character.  I'll describe the AAR featuring this latter bridge in my next post.