Learning Wargames – Scenery Techniques – Book Review

AK Interactive have launched a new variation or sub-series in the Learning Series and it is while hard to explain exactly what this new book is, I think they’ve yet again hit upon a winning idea.

What is Scenery Techniques? – This is the question many people will have when they see this title and to be frank, it is a little hard to explain. The Learning Wargames series is clearly geared towards people who hobby in the gaming scales (28mm-32mm predominantly) and despite this being a huge portion of the hobby market, there are a lot less instructional books out there for it than you would expect. Indeed, Ammo by Mig, AK Interactive, and Scale 75 are the biggest hobby book publishers and they cater more to the scale modelers and larger scale figure painters. The primary audience of this website is miniature wargamers and so I’m excited to talk about something that I think directly appeals to readers.

Having said all that, we still haven’t established what this book is. Scenery Techniques implies that you might see terrain and terrain related topics in this book and that’s not quite accurate. I’ll talk more about this later but I don’t think very many of the projects in this book result in terrain per say. Instead, you learn about how to make beautiful looking scenery for vignettes, dioramas, or perhaps part of an Armies on Parade-style display. I think this is important to acknowledge because it isn’t clear from the title what the main focus is and it would be a shame if someone bought this looking strictly for terrain tutorials. You can certainly apply some of the lessons to making really nice looking terrain but the tutorials will not instruct you how to make sturdy stuff that will stand up to the rigors of gaming.

If you’re looking to do display painting in wargaming scales, then there is plenty to like in this book. I would even go so far as to say that these parts of the hobby tend to be more neglected, even on Youtube where there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of hobby tutorials nowadays. So in that sense, AK Interactive is serving an audience that has been somewhat neglected in the past which is commendable.

What’s in the book? – This book is separated by building material and each material has at least a couple tutorials included as well. Here is the table of contents:

• Introduction
• Stone
  • Stone Step-By-Step
  • How to Make a Mountain at a Small Scale: Mountaintop Abbey
  • How to Make a Desert Scenery: Trudy’s Junkyard
  • How to Make a Stone Den
  • How to Make Stone Ruins
• Granite
  • Granite Step-By Step
• Marble
  • Marble Step-By-Step
• Wood
  • Wood Step-By-Step
  • How to Make a Wooden House Fantasy
• Water
  • Water Step-By-Step
  • How to Make a Swamp Scene: Feculent Gnarlmaw

Each material has a brief introduction which includes a bunch of photo references showing different ways you could paint them. These do a great job of getting you to think outside of the box. We’ve all painted stone for example, but Scenery Techniques does a great job of showing you that there’s more options than the typical gray paints we tend to gravitate towards. This is one of the parts of this book that I think the authors got really right and Scenery Techniques is a great jumping off point to try and push your hobby skills.

The Stone section covers a wide variety of topics including how to paint stone, how to sculpt stone, and how to build a house and ruins. Of all the sections in this book, this is the one area where I would have thought that I don’t have too much to learn since I’ve painted plenty of rockwork in the past but I found fresh ideas and inspiration like easy ways to create stone-like texture beyond drybrushing. The info on building cliffs and even houses is also pretty useful for dioramas, vignettes, and display boards as well. Sooner or later, you’ll have to model stonework in a project and this book will help prepare you for that task.

Granite and Marble are fairly similar in that you get a well-written introduction and then a couple of tutorials about how to handle these surfaces. Most of the tutorials focus on brushwork, though some utilize an airbrush too. Both of these sections are inspiring and prepare you to paint these challenging surfaces. I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to get granite and marble surfaces into future projects but I’m excited to do so after reading Scenery Techniques.

The Wood section is pretty extensive like the Stone section which makes sense because its another thing we’ve all painted before. Wood is quite a bit tougher than stone, in fact, but this book shows you how to paint it as accurately as possible. There are tutorials that cover wood planks in a fence, the surface of a door, and even the exterior of a house. That is a pretty thorough range and the weathering of wood is also considered in these tutorials. While AK Interactive have a book about just painting realistic wood in the Learning Series, I would recommend getting this book instead as it is higher quality even if the page count covering the topic is much lower overall.

Water is an interesting and surprising inclusion in Scenery Techniques as it is a fairly short section and there is a lot that can be said on the matter. AK Interactive have a detailed book of tutorials on the subject already. Fortunately, the tutorials are geared towards wargamers and describe how to add water to a gaming base as well as taking a piece of Games Workshop terrain and turning it into a diorama of sorts. I found this idea to be pretty novel and its something I’ll keep in my back pocket as the author(s) show how cool a piece of terrain can look if turned into a diorama.

Editorial Improvements – Something I would be remiss to not mention is that AK Interactive have finally figured out how to publish books in English effectively. The early books are somewhat infamous for having been written using some kind of translator service that didn’t work as well as either AK Interactive or readers would like. Understanding the context and the finer points of any given sentence could be challenging at times and that made the book harder to use as a learning resource. Jon Feenstra is credited as the editor and I give him a lot of credit because this book reads well in English and feels as though it could have been written by someone whose native language is English as well. I’ve read enough AK Interactive books with subpar translations that I really wasn’t sure if this day would ever come and I welcome it with open arms!

Scale Modelers Take on Wargaming – It was an interesting choice to make this book as the whole thing has a feel of Scale Modelers raid Warhammer and other gaming settings for cool projects. And of course, we’re glad to have them in our corner of the hobby. I point this out because I think its important to acknowledge that these projects do not make for good terrain (nothing in this book looks playable to my eyes, for example) and Scenery Techniques is really for people who want to paint and create things to the highest standard that they can. I think you will find these tutorials are better than what you can find on Youtube and make the book well worth the money.

Conclusion – I hope that this book is successful for AK Interactive as I’d love to see more things like this as I’m pretty much the target audience. So far, there are currently four books in the Learning Wargames series including Starships (there is a beginner and advanced version, interestingly enough) and Landships, also known as, tanks. These are obviously quite different than Scenery Techniques in their focus, though no less useful if you’re interested in the subject matter. AK Interactive have slowly and steadily improved their instructional hobby books and the last couple I’ve looked at have been thoroughly impressive. Scenery Techniques is probably my favorite yet and I’d give it a strong recommendation if it fits within your hobby interests.