Skull Piles

These skull piles are hydrostone pieces I picked up at discount from an unknown manufacturer a long time ago. The skulls were simply inked with a Flesh Wash and the ground inked with a Brown Ink. The skulls were then drybrushed a tan to Bleached Bone to a white. The ground was drybrushed a dark brown to a light brown to tan. A bit of my super secret ground cover mix* was attached with white glue and they were done.

* Super secret ground cover mix is Woodland Scenics green fine turf, Woodland Scenics dark green static grass, Woodland Scenics light green static grass, Woodland Scenics light brown fine turf and ground, dried tea leaves. Mix according to taste.

Lemax Collection Mill Stream

This steam was purchased at a DIY store after Christmas time. The set consists of two Mill Stream sets and one Mill Stream Fork set. The weeks following Christmas and Halloween are a great time to pick this stuff up for next to nothing. As the store I went to was already picked through, I had to bite it and get this stuff for only 70% off before it was gone. Click pictures for a larger view.

The Mill Stream set claims to come with 11(!) pieces. Six of those are little, snow- covered pine trees, two are end caps for the stream and only three are acually river pieces; two straights and one bend. The fork comes with 10 pieces; 6 trees, three caps and 1 fork piece. They are cast in a hard resin or plastic and are fairly heavy and durable. Each piece also has little felt pads on the bottom so they don't scratch or damage your gaming board (or whatever.) Each piece is about 1/2" thick and when all three sets are combined together they stretch just over 4 feet.

Unfortunatly it came with a snow finish. That had to go.

These shots are the pieces before painting. As you might be able to see, the banks of the river are big rocks and boulders covered in snow. There are also tree stumps and branches dotting the banks. The water portion is sculpted to look like moving water, painted and then coated with a clear coat of some kind. The coating is quite soft and sticky and picks up fingerprints easily.

All snow covered areas, tree stumps and branches were hand painted black. The rock and water areas were left as- is. The tree stumps and branches were drybrushed first with a dark brown, then a brown- grey mix and finally a light grey.

White glue was used to adhere the magic ground cover mix to all of the black painted areas. A mix of green course turf and brown fine turf were then applied sporradically on the pieces to break up the uniformity.

The project was simple enough and though it was a bit expensive than I would traditionally have spent on terrian (around $25), it is still cheaper than purchasing a river or stream specifically made for wargaming.

The Stagnant Lake

For this piece I finally moved to the big- time. The base is made from 1/4" MDF. No double- corrugated cardboard or foamcore here, and no masking tape on the edges, either.

The banks of the lake were made by tracing the outline of the base on a piece of cardboard. This was cut out and then the bed was drawn out on the carboard and cut out as well. This left a nice ring- shape to fill with water.

The cardboard bank was glued onto the MDF with white glue and allowed to dry. Once it had dried the edge of the carboard was cut and angle for a better transition from table top to terrain. Wall filler was then applied to the bank to smooth out the corrugations and to blend the bank into the base.

The center hill is a piece of blue insulation foam cut to shape and smoothed with sandpaper.

The cross is simply balsa wood strips cut from a large sheet and glued together. The cross is pinned together with with floral wire to help keep it together and glued with with white glue. The cross was also pinned and glued to the hill.

The figure on the cross is a MageKnight Wereraven minus wings. The feet were bent down slightly to look like it was hanging. Small disks were cut from a plastic lid with a leather punch and glued on the wrists for nail heads. The figure was attached to the cross with super glue.

Sand was glued to the bank of the lake with white glue.

Once everything was dry the foam hill was brush painted black and then the piece was spray- primed black. The lake bed and banks were drybrushed from dark brown to brown to light brown to tan. The cross was drybrushed from dark brown to Burnt Sienna to a few shades of grey. The figure was painted like a normal mini.

Once painting was finished my standard ground cover mix was glued in various placed on the banks and along the edge of the lake bed to simulate weeds. Bristles from an old paintbrush were cut off and glued to the edges of the banks to simulate rushes.

After this was dried the nightmare began...

After the sucess I had with Woodland Scenics E-Z Water on the Jungle Project I thought I'd use it again. I began by heating up a batch and pouring it into the lake. It didn't flow out very well and began to cool in lumps. Several more batches were heated and poured, each one larger than the last. The liquid still wouldn't flow evenly, and began to form a lumpy, uneven surface. Air bubbles also began to form all over the piece.

I finally stopped playing with the stuff when it set off the smoke detector in the hallway. It wasn't smokey in the house, but according to my wife the smell was aweful. I hadn't noticed being I was working over the crap.

I let the piece cool as I opened doors and windows with single- digit temperaturs outside to get the smell out of the house.

After seeing how the E-Z Water had ruined my hard work, I took the suggestion from the instuctions and drove over to my dad's place with terrain in hand to try to even the surface with a heat gun.

The heat gun worked well; at high setting it burned the brush bristles and ground cover, but on low setting it slowly melted the water and smoothed it out- somewhat. Unfortunatly the foam hill couldn't take the heat and shrunk down to a small bump.

Woodland Scenics E-Z Water is only good for small puddles and such. Never use it for a large project, or you will be very disappointed. The piece turned out all right in the end, but an hour and a half with a heat gun just isn't worth it.

At one point I left this piece in my car overnight in the middle of a Minnesota winter.  The next day I was horrified to see that the E-Z Water had cracked all over the piece, all the way to the base.  I was so disheartened I placed it on a shelf and it has sat there ever since.  I just had an idea to turn it into a swamp or bog...

Jungle Foliage

When Games Workshop repackaged aquarium plants and tried to resell them for a huge amount of money I was inspired to whip up some simple stands of dense jungle foliage. My first stop was to find a cheap supplier. I found www.wholesale-aquarium-plants.com (which is now , unfortunately, out of business). Instead of $10 for a mat of plants you could get them for $1.69.
Combining my fresh shipment of plastic plants with a rather large pile I already owned, I set to work.

I used MageKnight figure bases for the bases of these plants. They're round, sturdy and I have a lot of them. I simply popped the two halves of the bases apart with a screwdriver and covered any holes with masking tape if necessary.

After preping bases I pulled all of the plants off of the sprue. I then started clumping them together to see how many pieces I would need to get a full- looking base. Most of the bases required 10 plants; some only took 5.

Once the plants were arranged in a pleasing fashion I held them upside down in my hand an applied a huge glob of hot glue and pressed them onto the base.

The more hot glue you have, the longer it will take for it to cool and harden. Some of the pieces had to be held in place for some time before they would stand on their own.

Some of the plants were so rigid that they would not stand up at all. They were based a little differently. A small sliver of pink insulation foam about 1/4" thick was cut out and broke into an uneven , rock-like chunk. It was then hot glued to a MageKnight base. I then used the end of a small screwdriver to punch as many holes as I needed for all the plants into the foam.

Each of the plant pieces had a large hunk of plastic at the bottom with a hole in it. This was used to mount the plant to the sprue. I simply cut those off, put a dab of hot glue on the freshly cut end and then jammed them into the holes in the foam. The plants stayed in place nicely.

Once all the pieces were assembled I based them with my typical flock-static grass- ground tea leaves combination. This was attached with large amounts of white glue.

Once assembly was finished I spent some time pulling all of the hot glue strands out of the leaves of the plants. I'm not sure if there is a way to get around the spiderweb- like strands of hot glue.

River Ford

Not one of my projects, but similar to one I've done.  Mine is not done yet, and this one is, so I'll post it so you can get an idea of what we're doing.

The local game store carries a selection of items from Pegasus Hobbies.  This particular piece is their Museum Models River Set.

You get about 4' of river.  It is painted plastic.  The water sculpting is a bit odd, but it still looks good and is a steal at $20.

We found that to enhance the look it helps to give the dirt colored banks a wash of Citadel Brown wash.  It gives the bank more depth, and dulls the glossy finish.  A bit of ground cover on the bank really enhances the look as well.

A ford was added to one of the short, straight sections to create a crossing for our Song of Blades and Heroes Campaing we will be running starting January.

My friend Brian simply coated a section of the river in white glue, then placed some stones randomly in the river.  The result is a quick and effective method.

The glue is still wet in these pictures, but it does dry clear and looks good.

Jungle Terrain- Finished

The pieces were finished by hand-priming the rocks on the bases black, then drybrushing them from dark grey to white. A mixute of flock, static grass and ground tea leaves were then glued on top of the rocks with white glue. You can click some pictures for larger views.

My brother's Deathwing terminators were nice enough to model these pieces.

Oops! Looks like one got too close the carnivorous plant!

The finished Flower- Trees of Gripping Death and Stuff.

A hill. Cut with a razor blade from blue insulation foam. The top is finished like the bases of the trees.

The pond was finished like the other pieces. The same flock mix was glued to the banks and bottom of the pond itself.

The water was done with Woodland Scenics E-Z Water. I had heard bad things about this product but it was cheap, and looked easy to work with. It is easy to heat and pour, but I'm not sure why I got such horrendous bubbles. I didn't want to use a heat gun to try to fix it (like the instructions say) for I didn't want to melt my plants in the process. It's not too bad for a first attempt. I may need more practice working with it.

NOTE: the pellets stink when heated and while cooling. I would recommend putting the terrain piece outside for a few hours as well as any utensiles and containers used to melt the pellets.

I don't know how well the water re-melts. Apparently I'm very lucky or an excellent judge of volumn for I had next to no leftover "water" when the pond was full. Make sure you know exactly how much you'll need.

Jungle Terrain- Construction

I had been stockpiling plastic jungle trees and fake plants for some time before I decided that I should actually build something out of them to make room for more junk.  I took some in- progress shots of these pieces while I was building them.

There are a total of 9 pieces in the jungle terrain set. 8 of them are based on old AOL CDs and one is a foam hill.

This is an example of a typical piece. The plastic jungle trees are Games Workshop. They were cleaned and assembled as normal. The leaves were given a green wash and the trunks were given a brown wash.

The CDs were prepped by covering the hole with masking tape. The GW trees were then superglued into place and various plant parts were attached to the base with hot glue. White glue was used to attach pebbles to the bases. These pebbles were obtained by sifting regular playgound sand through a collander.

This man-eating plant is actually the head of a Resident Evil toy. It is made of hollow, soft rubber so it was filled with plaster of paris and allowed to dry so it would hold its shape. More plastic plants were glued on and a plastic vine was placed around a tree stump which is actually part of the arm of the same toy. The hard, plastic stump was washed with brown ink. The man- eating plant was not washed because the rubber would not take ink. It just pooled up and looked crappy.

These two tall trees were made from the same Resident evil toy. The top portions are the toy's arms and the bottom is the toy's root- like feet. The two parts were simply pinned together and the joint was resculpted to look like one continuous piece. The trees were given a brown wash and more vines were glued up their length to help hide the joints of the former arms and legs.

I wanted to create a stagnant pond in the jungle set. This was done by cutting a piece of coruugated cardboard to fit on the CD and then cutting the pond out of the center. Bits of cardboard were used to fill in the area around the tree roots. The carboard was simply hot glued into place.

Wall filler was used to cover the cardboard and to give the pond bed a more even transition from the cardboard edge to the bottom of the CD. It also hides the corrugations of the cardboard.

Here is a shot of my old "workbench" (which was really a $15 Walmart desk) during the project.

Houses of Death

These are simply a couple of terrain pieces I painted up. The local game store had a 75% off sale on a bunch of JR Miniatures items, and I picked these Houses of Death up for something like $2.00 each. I only bought these and left piles and piles of other pieces there, like castles and bridges and stuff. I'm still kicking myself for not buying all of it. Anyways, click some pictures for a larger view.

These are cast in some high- density plaster, so instead of priming them like I normally would I simply applied the desired color of ink directly to the piece and let the plaster absorb it. Once it was dry I simply drybrushed. The top one is my first attempt. I think it turned out much better than the bottom one. It sold on Ebay for $1.

Fields

The fields are based on foamcore with the edges masked off as usual. The walls are plaster casts from the Hirst Arts Castlemolds Fielstone Walls mold. They are simply glued into place with "Tacky" glue; a extra thick white glue.

Incredibly fine sand was glued to the foamcore to represent the soil. I picked this stuff up from my dad. It's normally mixed into stains and varnishes and gives some texture and grip to hardwood stairs. I'm not sure of the brand name. The entire piece was basecoated in black. The walls were drybrushed from dark grey to white and the soil was drybrushed from dark brown to tan.

The bushes are made from bump chenille. It was simply dipped in green dye (made from green paint and water) and immediatly rolled in flock. Once dry they make nice bushes or trees. These were not glued into place in order place units inside the walls.

The entire piece was coated in a thinned mix of white glue to strenghten it. The glue also gave the piece a satin sheen to it, so I have to get a matte spray to dull it down.

Rough Ground

Rough going represents terrain that is hard to move through and fight in, but does not block line of sight.

These templates are made of foamcore. On three of the pieces the edges were cut at an angle to make a smoother transition from terrain to tabletop. The largest piece was left with the edges squared. The edges were taped to protect the exposed foam. Smaller templates were made from thin cardboard as well with the edges masked off as usual.

Small stones were glued in piles on the foamcore templates with white glue. Large glass-type fragments (for fish aquariums) were glued onto the smaller templates in piles.

The rocks were painted black and drybrushed from dark grey to white, except for the large template. The large templates were based in a light brown.

Static grass was glued onto the templates; the larger templates recieving two applications.

The seperatly- based rock piles are placed on the templates to fill them out, but are easily moved around for the placement of troops.

Hills

I've done all kinds of hills, for all sorts of games.  Nothing ever really fancy. 

These hills were made for use in Battletech.  They are simply 3/4" white insulation foam cut to shape with a large razor or box cutter, painted black and flocked.  These are nice because it is obvious where the elevations are, like a contour map.  They are not the most visually appealing.

This hill is made in the same way.  The shapes were cut out using a cheap hot wire cutter from Michaels.  There are layers of 3/4" foam stacked on top of each other; pinned together using toothpicks and glued together with white glue.  The hill was painted black, coated in white glue, and coated in regular old playground sand.  Once dry it was drybrushed progressively lighter shades of brown.

Here are more hills done in a similar style.  The desert ones are made by glueing two 3/4" pieces of white foam together and cutting the shape out with a razor blade.  A hot wire cutter was then used to carve in the rock face.  The hill was painted black, and the rock face was drybrushed. grey and white.  Regular fine terrarium sand was glued to the tops.

These hills are carved from some scraps of 2" thick blue insulation foam, but in all other ways made the same way as the desert ones above.  I much prefer this to the white foam as it doesn't make such a mess when cutting.  Instead of sand on the top I used green ground cover, or flock.

Here is yet another hill with a rock face.  This one is different and has a sloping back side.  Blue or pink insulation foam is good for these kinds of hills because you can rough cut it with a razor or hot wire cutter, then sand it smooth.  The photograph is of some testing I did on this piece by painting the hill green first, and some different types of flock.  It didn't turn out well.  The hill now has my traditional ground cover on it.

The last two examples of hills I have are of more finish, natural flowing hills.  Except for this one:

A 3" piece of pink insulation foam, cut to shape with a razor blade and sanded smooth.  I painted it black, and flocked it wiht my standard mix.  With this piece I also coated the flock with a layer of white glue to make it more durable.  This hill is hard as a rock, and very rough to the touch. 

Here are some smaller hills from blue foam for my 15mm WWII skirmish.