This article is a little odd, it’s not as much about terrain as it is about terrain … well, terrain reference and inspiration.
I started wargaming just as the internet was becoming ‘a thing’, well something more than the rudimentary bulletin boards of the early nineties. A lot of my inspiration was from magazines and popping into the local Games Workshop store to see what foam and cardboard they were gluing together this week.
As the internet expanded though and websites, as we’d recognise them today, started popping up things started getting interesting. There is so much good stuff out there these days on so many different platforms, but “back in the day” I used Terragenesis (one of the original terrain tutorial websites) a lot.
For some strange reason, perhaps because I was so used to magazines and books, I used to print out articles from Terragenesis and keep them in a folder. Every now and then I look at those old folders and say “I should chuck this out”, but that doesn’t seem to happen, it just goes back on the shelf!
These days though, things are VERY different! Whilst Terragenesis is still an active website, it is quite old and the tutorials could now be mostly considered nostalgic, plus many images no longer work properly. For me now, after years of experience I’m not so much interested in ‘tutorials’ as I am in inspiration … and one place that is FULL of it is Facebook.
There are so many wonderful groups on Facebook that are jammed packed full of talented people sharing so many wonderful pictures and terrain projects. As we all know though, Facebook moves pretty quickly and before you know it things can be hard to find again. That is why I use the ‘Save Post’ feature a lot!
I’m constantly adding posts from various terrain groups to my saved posts, into loosely organised folders. You can save any post on Facebook by simply clicking on the 3-Dots (I’ve always call that an ‘ellipsis’ but most everyone else calls them 3-dots!) at the top right of any post, and then click on Save Post. You can setup and save posts to your own custom folders, making it easy to find specific collections of posts when ever you need them.
This picture is a classic example of some amazing inspiration, originally posted by Daz Van Der Young on the Bolt Action Terrain Makers group. This post would be hard to find again after a few months, so saving it to my Terrain Inspiration folder means I can find it anytime I like.
I’m really not too sure how many people use some of the more advanced (yet obscure) features of Facebook. I’m constantly seeing people type “Following” in the comments of posts they are interested in seeing updates for, when under the ellipsis on any post you can select “Turn on Notifications”. You’ll then get any updates to that post and don’t need to be one of those people writing “Following” like everyone else.
I’ve saved so many posts in a single folder called Terrain Inspiration over the years, it was all I really needed when I first discovered the feature. I’m now at the point where I’d like to have a bit more ‘depth’, for example, Bolt Action Inspiration, Sci-Fi Inspiration, LoTR Inspiration etc.
Perhaps I’ll get around to creating a few new ‘collections’ and breaking down my saved posts into a little more granularity but in the mean time there are so many amazing posts saved here in my collections that I’ve been saving to inspire my next project.
I’m very excited to start actually using some of this awesome inspiration I’ve been collection and getting some new table build projects underway. I recently saw some wonderful Italian tables on the Bolt Action groups which have inspired me to do my own.
Do you Save posts on Facebook, or do you use some other ways of storing (and finding!) inspiration you come across on the internet?