Having created your walls, fences and hedges, it might be a good idea to have something to be enclosed by them. As is always the case, the raw material you use depends upon the scale of your figures. Yellow fake fur is often used to represent cornfields when using 28mm figures or larger, as used in a Franco Prussian war game by the South Somerset Wargames Group (Figure 178).
An alternative material used is coir door matting. If you want to avoid giving yourself extra work, don’t buy one with wording or other designs it. The South Dorset Military Society used a piece of doormat in their game Cornwallis at Brandywine (Figure 179).
Although this material tends to be used with larger scale figures due to its height, it can successfully be used with smaller scales, as was the case with Jon Soper and Steve Pearce’s 15mm Marlburian game (Figure 180).
Yet another option is to use artificial grass (Figure 181) which can be purchased in a wide variety of finishes, making it suitable for almost any scale of figures: long grass, short grass, densely packed grass, even a 1:1 scale lawn!
Figure 178: Prussian troops advance into a fake fur cornfield. (The South Somerset Wargames Group)
Figure 180: A section of coconut doormat standing in for a cornfield during a 15mm Marlburian game. (Jon Soper and Steve Pearce)
Figure 182: The field has been tilled, but there’s no sign of the crops as yet.
Figure 184: A field awaiting ploughing.
When creating fields with tall crops growing in them, it is aesthetically more pleasing if you cut the field into pieces, similar in width to that of an appropriate number of single bases or a movement tray, so that you can remove sections of the crops as your troops march through. For planted but not fully grown fields of crops, or for use with smaller scale figures, ribbed doormats can give an interesting effect (Figures 182–183). Just cut the doormat to size, enclose it with suitable fencing and that’s it. And with crops growing, we need to enclose the field to keep them safe: the construction of fences is covered in Chapter Eleven.
An interesting additional use for these ribbed doormats can be found if you turn them over. The underside lacks the ridges, but has enough texture to drybrush and simulate the effect of an unploughed field (Figure 184).