Season of Scenery: Scatter Terrain

It's taken me way longer than I hoped, but I've completed my first Season of Scenery project.

As much as I like making sci-fi and modern/post-apoc scenery, I really like making fantasy stuff and especially natural scenery such as trees. I've been wanting to make something like this terrain for a while and after buying some MDF bases from Etsy I finally got around to knocking some out.

Once again I forgot to take WIP photos of every stage, so here's eight of the 20 bases after I sealed them with matte Mod Podge, painted them Marsh Green craft paint and glued some stones to a few. 

The next stage was to add some lumps and bumps, and this was the moment when I realised it would have been a hell of a lot easier to do this BEFORE painting them. I made the bumps from Crayola modelling clay and painted the bases with Mod Podge to provide some adhesion. Once I'd got the clay the way I wanted it, I painted over it with more Mod Podge to seal it and then cracked out the Marsh Green again and painted over it.

Once all that was dry I applied another coat of Mod Podge to each base and plastered them with my flock mix. I took them outside, put them on the lid of the hot tub, sprayed them with heavily watered-down PVA to seal the flock and left them to dry in the 90-degree heat. And this is where disaster struck.

It's been a hot, humid summer here in the Green Mountain State, with the occasional rainstorm. And while at work that afternoon it absolutely hammered down to the point where looking out of the door was like looking into mist. About 30 minutes into the deluge I suddenly remembered about the bases being outside and phoned Alicia, who braved the downpour to rescue them. Unfortunately the rain had reactivated the thinned PVA, dissolved it and washed off some of the flock. The bases spent the night in the kitchen before being reflocked and resealed in the morning.

So now it's time for the trees. I own some Woodland Scenics tree armatures but they're somewhere in the spare room, which along with being a dump now has a bath in the middle of it thanks to our bathroom being remodeled. So I used some cheap plastic trees I got from Amazon several months ago. They're not perfect, and some completely suck, but they did the job. After picking out which ones I wanted to use, I painted the trunks to make them a bit more realistic and used a paintbrush handle to make holes in the bumps so I could superglue them in place.

I tried to mix the tree types a bit to add some variation, and I think I did OK. The bases looked a bit dull so I dug out my clump foliage and went to town with it, using cheap four-for-a-dollar tubes of superglue to stick it all in place and then seal it on. I added some dark green tufts and flowers and they were basically done; the final thing was to paint the base rims black.

I'm really happy with how these turned out. The foliage could do with a bit more variation in colour, and I didn't even think about using static grass until about 30 seconds ago, but on the whole they'll work as fantasy terrain or even random items in a modern park.

More to come!

Including a shedload of cavern terrain, more resin pours, rock faces and a couple of MDF buildings. Stay tuned!