Back at it!
Wellp. It's time to get the ball rolling again. Laying out the terrain I've done so far on my brand new mat has kindled my interest once more. I am so close to being able to fill out a gaming board at last!
Next thing on my 'to do' list are the hills. For years I have used some very lame looking foam hills, half done and sitting unfinished since I was a teenager. Time to get some better looking parking lots for my artillery trains!
As I was doing my research on how to make these wargaming essentials, I've bumped onto one of the Terrain Tutor's tutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOy5yqctzzA The main ingridients here are expanded polystytene and cork bark. I really like the look I must say and the tutorial seemed very straightforward to follow.
They reminded me a lot of the rolling Rohan hills found in the Lotr movies. I must say that I've always been strongly influenced by the tolkienesque aesthetic in my warhammer endavours. Long before the movies were made I have replayed the siege of Helm's deep using wood elf archers, empire troops and plastic saurus warriors standing in for orcs. In my mind the Old World and Middle Earth have very often felt alike.
I started off by making several sketches to get the overal idea on paper. I rarely do this as the end results rarely look like the designs and I'm usually okay just getting stuck in. Right from the start I knew I wanted to make a little tomb entrance in one of the hillsides. Naturally inspired by Theodred's barrow (in for a penny in for a pound I guess with the lotr nonsense)!
The beggining was as usual. Made some ovalish MDF bases. I know these can warp over time, but I really like their weight and how they sit on the table. I ain't wasting my pvc supplies on this!!!
As the tutorial suggested, I cut off strips of cork bark to act as my rocky hill slopes. Making this look convincing is harder than I thought! At this point I've also constructed the portal leading to the tomb, using some trusty PVC strips.
I fiddled around a lot trying make the door fit the corkbark. Fortunately it is a very pleasant and soft material to work with and this did not take too long.
After I was happy with how the rocky bits looked, I stuck them to the bases, creating these odd looking hill 'shells'. After that I cut some expanded polystyrene to shape and stuck it down to make the bulk of the hills. It's a bit tricky to describe, but dead easy essentialy:
After some vigorious shaving off of eccess material, sanding and gap filling I blended all the joints by smushing it all in spackle.
Note the different shade of the filler on my "tomb hill". I was trying to get a bit of work done in the morning before work and I've left the pot of filler open for the day. Naturally I came home to a rock hard pot of spackle. FUN. Luckily I had another one. This confirms my suspicion that no real model making can be accomplished this bloody early in the morning.
After the spackle had set, it was a simple matter of gluing down a solid covering of sand and grit, with a couple of larger rocks and bits of cork here and there. Here some sharper, non-cell phone pics:
Pretty happy with how this is going, hope I can get the painting done soon.