Lumps and Bumps – Scratch built burial mound

Stephen ponders on hills and describes his latest terrain piece…

Hills. They just never look right on the wargames table.

Look at a games table and you may see two or three little dumplings, big enough for a few elements.

Those are hills, apparently.

In reality, whole armies and battles are fought on hills (e.g. Hastings). But not on a wargames table where Mother Nature has to conform to a terrain feature that is no bigger than L on any one side and where diagonally it can be no more than L+S. Or some such tortured formula.

So what is a ‘hill’ on the wargames table?

Not really a hill, that’s for sure. I should say that I don’t play too many mass battle games, so the focus of this project is what a hill could be on the skirmish table.

I suspect most of us use modular, scatter, terrain rather than game boards with fixed terrain features. So we are looking at terrain features that can be plonked down anywhere on the table. Which, like it or not, gives rise to that dumpling hill effect.

I had a thought about what those lumps and bumps could be. Yes, it could represent undulating terrain, the majority of which is gently rising. The odd ‘steep hill’ could be a rocky scarp or rise that is covered in broken ground and brambles.

Yeah, that works.

But I thought of what else it could represent, and something that would add character and theme.

The answer seemed obvious – burial mounds and chambers! Yup, that would explain why they are dumpling shaped. It’s not a ‘hill’ so much as a burial mound – game effects are exactly the same.

So that’s what this project is – making a burial mound/hill.

I based this model on chambers such as Wayland’s Smithy – a stone-faced entrance into an earth mound. That would give it a bit more character and presence than just a plain green mound.

The entrance way was made using embossed styrene from Wills Scenics. Rather than just cut the sides diagonally I then went and trimmed the styrene so it conformed to the shape of the stones to make it looked like the stones had been laid. This was then stuck to two layers of 5mm foamboard. The main mound was going to be made from a piece of EPS foam.

The base was cut from modellers light ply and the foam mound was glued to that and the entrance way was glued to the front. To give the entrance a bit of depth I tore away some of the foam (this would later be lined in air dry clay to smooth it out and make it easier to paint).

When that had all dried it was out with the Miliput. This was used to make the trilithon doorway and also to cover the top of the foamboard to look like stonework.

On to painting. I used my standard way of painting stone – start with a khaki undercoat. I couldn’t use spray on this because it would melt the EPS foam, so I slapped on some Revell acrylic khaki with a brush. And, as ever, this was washed in GW Agrax Earthshade.

I’m not going to go in-depth on the painting – I’ve covered my stonework process before. But, in brief, the whole is then given successive dry-brushings with a mix of khaki and grey and a bit of white. Then a bit of weather – Agrax Earthshade to re-establish edges, and dark green for damp.

Then on to the flocking. It was given a base cover of a mix of railroad ballast and sand. After that it had static grass applied. I think it looks best to leave patches of the ballast or other basing materials on show – a blanket of velvet static grass just looks too much. To add to the texture of the model I then stuck down bits of clump foliage, to suggest brambles, nettles, and other weeds.

And that’s it! A really simple modelling project and now that little dumpling hill has a reason for looking the way it does.