WWI Marines Time to re-start

What I have found out over the last year or so is that I'm incapable of starting a project and carrying it through to completion before beginning the next one. At the moment I have one major project that has occupied my time over most of the last year, that would be my wild west town of Calamity. I have a bunch of buildings done for that and I have a good idea of how the board is going to take shape, but painting the miniatures has ground to a halt. Almost two years ago now, when I started this blog, the main project was my WWI US Marines. I finished 15 of them back then and I haven't picked up another one since. Last week I was catching up on some TV and I picked up the box of unpainted pewter and started to prep the rest of the marines for painting, and there are a lot of them. I sorted and bagged them in 15 man platoons each with 2 rifle grenade launchers and 2 chauchats (sho-sho) gunners. The impetus behind getting these back out is that my friend Scott just showed off his finished German force, so he could use an opponent.

I'm just going to concentrate on the rifle companies right now, a total of eight which means I have seven left to paint or 105 minis. I have also found that while I love competition painting I also need something to slide in between the competition pieces to relax a bit so I'm going to try and alternate one platoon of marines with one competition piece.

Now the town of Calamity has priority on getting finished right now, I have a lot invested in it and I'm pretty stoked to get to working on the board itself (time allowing of course). But after that is finished I do want to do something similar for the Marines, so I want to do a WWI board for the Marines, but more modular than Calamity will be. While I do want to do a trench board, I also want to recreate in some small way the terrain for Belleau Wood. This area is not only wooded its really a ridge and featured all kinds of interesting features. I plan on using a variation of something I found on the Roundwood's World blog:
http://sidneyroundwood.blogspot.com/2011/03/winter-sports-terrain-abode-of-madness.html
http://sidneyroundwood.blogspot.com/2011/05/no-mans-land-terrain-and-few-loose-ends.html
http://sidneyroundwood.blogspot.com/2011/05/glasgow-copse.html
http://sidneyroundwood.blogspot.com/2011/06/glasgow-copse-artillery-emplacement.html

I think I will have to go with larger base modules but I think Sydney's approach is very sound and will really help create the atmosphere I'm looking for. I may not be able to make my inserts as generic and still recreate the rugged terrain of Belleau Wood though but if I plan carefully I should be able to pull it off. The only other thing that I would like to do is make the inserts a bit less obvious. I'll have to figure out a way to help disguise the outlines a bit, just for aesthetic purposes.

A lot of this has also been driven by the book I hope to receive in late December or early January from one of the kickstarters that I backed: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deanputney/experience-world-war-i-through-a-german-officers-p

This picture of a quiet German trench system (obviously not a fire trench, there is no fire step) helped to get things moving again.