Stephen takes us through some terrain building ideas.
Having just completed a correspondence course with the University of Magrathea I thought I would embark on a bit of world building.
Well, start small with some terrain at first.
This is about a few terrain pieces I’ve made over the last couple of weeks and I thought I’d share my process. There’s going to be three different kinds here – some marsh/swamp areas, an area of low ground, and some scatter terrain items (log piles). These are nominally for use with 15mm games (but the swamps could be used as smaller pieces for 28mm games).
Let’s look at the area terrain pieces first, the swamps and low ground. As a basis I use modeller’s light ply bought from a local modelling shop. This is mainly used in radio-controlled aircraft. I buy sheets of 2mm thick ply. They are cut into shapes and then the edges are chamfered.
Both the swamps and low ground need raised edges, but different kinds.
It’s hard to represent low lying ground on the wargames’ table. Realistically the only way you can do it is by placing something on top of the table and declaring it as sunken ground. So that’s what this is going to be. Since I wanted a more robust edge, to give the idea of looking up/down to anyone on the edge, I chose to use air-dry clay. I tend to use the terracotta colour so if it chips it doesn’t glare out at you. It also takes a couple of days to dry properly. Thing with clay is that it shrinks as it dries and when this happens I’ll fill the gaps with something – in this case, Milliput, because…
The swamps. I just wanted a shallow, thin, lip around the surface because I intended on pouring resin into it and it was just something to hold it in. I rolled a big ball of Milliput and then put a bead around the edges and smoothed that out. Then left that to dry.
Here’s a thing I do. 99% of the time you end up mixing too much putty. Rather than throw the excess away I make scenic items. Things like sacks, jugs, bowls, bottles. That kind of thing. It makes use of the surplus and means you have a ready supply if you want to put together some baggage elements or just as dressing around the bases of other modelling projects.
Let’s put the paint on. I gave the sunken ground an all over with a khaki brown. The two swamp pieces had the edges done khaki and the swamp area in a lighter brown.
Once the paint had dried the sunken ground got an all-over covering of fine ballast (bought from a model railway shop). When the ballast had dried I then flocked the sunken ground with static grass but left areas of ballast showing for texture and variety. The swamps had the edges done with static grass.
Now put that aside and let it all dry.
And whilst drying let’s move on to the log piles. These are to represent stacks of pine logs for east European WW2 games. Whilst out for a walk in the local woods I collected some sticks. In actual fact, these are just model pine stacks, they are actual pine stacks because I collected pine twigs. The things I do in the name of authenticity. They are given a good scrub to get rid of any dirt and then left to dry out. Once dry I got out the hobby tool and chopped them all to the right length.
These are then all stuck together. I used a couple of different glues. The first one I did with PVA. But after doing it I realised it would take an age to dry (I went in thick to ensure it got all around the edges). So on the second two I used a cyanoacrylate. Much quicker drying time!
Back to the area features. I had some clump foliage and this was stuck in patches to the sunken ground to represent areas of weeds and undergrowth. That would be that for the sunken ground.
For the swamps I wanted to fill them with resin and then stick some clump foliage in that. The resin would give a nice shiny effect to look like water. Since I would only be using a relatively little amount of resin I used a proprietary two-part epoxy resin. Shop around and you might find a budget brand, but I already had some Araldite Rapid so that’s what I used. To the resin mix I added the smallest of small blobs of khaki acrylic paint. It really does only need to be a small amount, barely enough to cover the end of the barbecue skewer I used to mix it. Once that’s been poured in I just got bits of clump foliage and pressed them in the setting resin.
Once I complete a model what I do next is put it aside for a couple of days for everything to properly dry out. There’s always going to be some residual moisture in there somewhere.
But now I have some more terrain (you can never have too much, eh?) for a bit of variety on the table top. These were all very simple builds as well.
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