Cabbages & Kings

Wargaming leaves you doing some strange things.  Yup, I was spending my nights making cabbage patches.  At least, a single cabbage patch.  Rarely has so much effort had so little payoff.

The model cabbages are O scale model railroad accessories ordered from Hobbylinc.  Seven bucks gets you twenty cabbages.  Almost immediately after ordering, I realized that I should have ordered two packs.  I didn't.  It's just that it seemed like such a frivolous purchase that doubling down on it seemed insane.

Then I had to go around about making them all red versus all green versus a mix.  I really didn't like the mix option and my father weighed in with a vote of red or green but no mix.  I initially liked the all red option as a bit of color sounded appealing.  My trees are green.  My buildings are brown. Red would break up the monotony.

Then it hit me I had made the decision to exclude blues and any bright yellows from my Norman army.  The Normans are colorful, but my focus on creating color profiles for armies would be undone if my scenery was colorful.  Pieces should blend into the scenery.  After all, they are scenery.  

Without getting too nerdy with this (too late), I returned to an earlier idea I'd had that armies would be defined by a color palette and scenery by a textural palette.  Early on I had started doing tree bases differently from my building bases, but went back and re-based the trees (almost done with that) to conform in shade and base texture.  

All this goes back to some ideas I was mulling over about clarity of intent in gaming trumping scenic beauty or diversity.  That post is in the hopper now.  

So, green.  I primed all the cabbages with black primer.  The base coat was a heavily watered down, almost wash of Vallejo Olive Green.  Once that was dried, I used a Games Workshop Camo Green, dry brushed initially, with a more careful highlight followup.  Finally, I made some super light marks with Games Workshop's Rotting Flesh, which is a greenish shade of white.  

 The overall measurement is 14cm by 11cm, which works out to roughly 6x4in.

By day, I work a desk job.  By night, I'm Chris, King of the Cabbages.