Season of Scenery: Hills

A cheerleader with a machine gun hangs out on the top of a rocky hill. Yes, it's another edition of "random female mini looks totally out of place on another bit of scenery" and this time it's Candy's turn to provide some scale.

I've mentioned that our spare room currently has a bath in it thanks to two of our four bathrooms being remodeled. On the one hand this is a pain in the arse, but on the other the delivery of two new vanities means I've got several large sheets of 1.5" thick expanded polystyrene foam to play with. The other day I decided to do something with them and knocked out these rocky hills.

Although they were all basically made, painted and decorated the same way, I used different techniques to get the textures on each one. To get the basic hills I simply broke off chunks of the foam and then shaped them with my hot wire cutter which also smoothed the surface of the foam. Once I was happy with how they looked the larger ones were stuck to 5x7" wooden bases and the small one to a 3" base and all were plastered with black Mod Podge.

The first one I made will forever be known as "the cake" thanks to Alicia asking me if I was making a slice of cake. Great. Anyway, to get the texture on this one I slapped on Vallejo Black Lava paste with a butter knife and used a toothpick to add some lines. I glued on random bits of gravel and some small pieces of bark to the tops and base and then set it aside to dry and got on with the other ones.

Once it was ready, the whole hill was plastered with Pewter Grey craft paint and then heavily overbrushed/drybrushed with Grey, Country Grey, Fog Grey and Granite Grey. I daubed on some watered-down Agrax Earthshade and Seraphim Sepia to add tonal variations and gave the rock a final light drybrush with Antique White applied in random areas. The base and tops were painted with Olive Green craft paint.

The base and tops were brushed with Mod Podge and sprinkled with a flock mix, then sealed with thinned matte varnish. Then it was simply a case of supergluing on clump foliage and tufts in random spots, and making some flowers by dabbing Mod Podge onto the top of some dark green tufts and then dipping them in Autumn Yellow loose foliage.

The small tree is one of the crappier ones from the set I used to make scatter terrain a couple of weeks ago. I just dunked it straight into the pot of Mod Podge and then dumped a ton of flock over it, and when it had dried I did it again to build more depth. 

I went to town with the wire cutter on these two, using it to slice out some curved vertical ridges for which I'm sure there's a geological term but I don't know it. I decided not to use any kind of texture on the rock faces and just painted them the same way as the first hill, using homemade black wash to shade them and thinned Burnt Sienna to add some tones.

Again I used Mod Podge on the base and tops of the rocks and plastered them with flock, and then I used 2mm static grass to add some different vegetation. More tufts, foliage and flowers and they were done. These were by far the easiest and quickest ones to do as I didn't have to wait around for any texture paste to dry.

The final hill was covered with Liquitex modelling paste as my Black Lava stuff is on its last legs. While the paste was still a bit tacky I sprinkled a mix of crushed stone and sand over it and patted it down. When it dried the whole thing got sealed with black Mod Podge and then it was painted the same way as the first one. Again I used bits of tree bark on the base to simulate larger rocks.

Once all the painting was done I went to town with the foliage, flock and flowers and added a tree. 

All of them had their base rims painted black, and they were done! On the whole I'm happy with them; they were simple to make and the hot wire cutter is a lot easier and faster to use than a knife. As I still have probably 20 square feet of foam left I'll be making more of these, although I really need to use more organically shaped bases than just plain oval ones.

More scenery to come soon: I'm still working on the MDF buildings, the cavern terrain is done and should be posted soon, and I have something a bit Slaanesh in the works! If I've said it once, I've said it a zillion times: stay tuned!

Halloween... in July?

The Halloween tat is coming in thick and fast at work. Of course, we have nowhere to put it but why would our distribution centre let a little thing like that get in the way? And if you think it's crap that we've got this stuff out almost four months early, the local WalMart already has Christmas stuff on the shelves...