Wire Mesh Fence Tutorial Part 3

This is the final part of the wire mesh fence series, and covers painting and finishing the pieces. Part 1 can be found here and part 2 can be found here.

Painting

The bulk of the painting was done with Humbrol spray cans:

• M33 Black for undercoating
• 53 Gunmetal for the mesh
• M29 Dark Brown for the ground

I used about one and a half cans of Black on these, mainly trying to get the filler on the bases covered, and used the Gun Metal on the mesh. To avoid getting gunmetal on the ground, I masked the ground area with masking tape first. This worked well, although the masking tape did pull off the undercoat in a couple of places.

Bases masked off before Gunmetal applied

To protect the mesh when I sprayed the ground, I made a cover for each fence section from paper. The covers were cut slightly longer than the sections, and twice the height, then folded in half and sellotaped at the ends. They were placed over each section and the ground sprayed with Dark Brown. It worked fairly well, and although a bit of the brown did get onto the bottom of some of the meshes, these were tidied up with normal gun metal paint.

The fence posts were painted dark grey (to give the impression of concrete), the individual rocks were painted a light grey, and all parts were drybrushed with an appropriate highlight colour.

The "KEEP OUT" signs were painted brown, and the words "KEEP OUT" added. I considered something more fancy (e.g. skull and crossbones), but decided it wasn't worth the risk of messing up and having to redo it (freehand painting is not my strongest area).

Finally, the bases were flocked and I swore to myself that that's the last scenery I build - at least for a while...

Normal fence piece

Damaged fence piece

Smaller fence pieces

Possible extras

I decided to keep the fencing as simple as possible, because a) it makes the scenery usable in more periods, b) the more I added to it, the more likely I would be to make mistakes and c) it got to the stage where I just wanted the pieces finished. However, they could be enhanced by adding coils of barbed wire along the top or having the top of the posts angled over at 45 degrees (again, possibly with barbed wire added). Separate gate pieces are also a possibility.

The fencing in action

I haven't used the pieces in a game yet, but below is a picture to show their size compared to standard 28mm figures.

The zombies in the photograph are figures I've just finished and there will be more pictures of them in next week's post. The hunters are just various figures and conversions I've painted over the years. The buildings are Hovels 20mm, which is why the doors look too small.