Finished: Marsh Terrain

After many setbacks, they're finally finished!

First Batch:

Second Batch:

Comparison:

The static grass on the first batch doesn't look quite as bad as I thought. I might go back over them with the 4mm "dead" grass mix which I used on the second batch.

With those done, I think I will probably switch back to painting figures. I'll probably make a start on my ancient Germans for "Infamy, Infamy!" - that should keep me busy for a week or two.

Wednesday Workbench 26 August

I'm sure that you have been expecting me to post pics of the finished marsh terrain pieces for a couple of days, but they aren't quite finished. It took until Monday evening for the gloss Mod Podge to fully dry (I should have built it up in thin layers rather than doing a deep pour) and it had shrunk somewhat and the surface wasn't flat but followed the undulations of the texture underneath. So I decided to add a second pour (with some ink mixed in) to correct that.

Yesterday morning I checked and it had dried, but the surface was still undulating. I decided to add static grass anyway, but went a bit heavy with the first pass of green stuff which meant that there wasn't much free PVA for the second pass of "patchy" grass to stick to. Once that had dried, I still wasn't happy with the water surface and was also not happy with the flocking so I decided to start on some more pieces to replace them. I cut some more 2mm blue foam to size and glued that to MDF terrain bases and left them to cure overnight.

This morning I used the hot-wire cutter to trim and bevel the foam. I then created depressions for the water effects by rubbing the rounded handles of some scissors over the patches of the foam to compress it. The foam was then scuffed up with a scrubbing brush and the MDF underside and the foam on top were base-coated with Nutmeg Spice paint. The depressions then got painted with raw umber craft paint, with a thin wash of Army Painter Dark Tone added to darken the deepest parts.

Once the wash was dry, I mixed a few drops of olive green ink into some Vallejo water effects and added it to the depressions on the new pieces. Realising that that would also sort out the water surface problem with the original pieces, I mixed up some more, tinted with AP Strong tone wash, and added it to those.

If the water effects have dried tomorrow, I will build up the "land" parts with some acrylic caulk, add texture paste and paint it. Flocking the second batch with static grass will probably need to wait until Friday.

Paint table Saturday 22 August

Yesterday I got all the woodland/forest terrain bases base-coated and dry-brushed.

I then began work on the swamp bases. I base-coated these in a darker colour and dry-brushed them. The next step was to add some dark green-brown ink into the "pools". For some unfathomable reason I decided to spread the green ink wash (thinned down somewhat) over the ground areas. Yup, big mistake. To correct that, once it was dry I had to dr-brush them again with the base and highlight colours (after airbrushing a coat of matt varnish to seal in the ink wash). Later on I added some slightly watered down gloss Mod Podge for the water effect. Almost 24 hours later, some of the deeper pools are still drying:

As I can't really do anything more with the terrain until the Mod Podge has dried (hopefully tomorrow?) I finished prepping the last of the figures for my "Infamy, Infamy!" project this morning and this afternoon I started gluing figures onto sticks ready for priming and painting:

That's the Germans done; once they have been primed I will do the same with the Romans, the animals and the civilians.

Terrain Table T(h)ursday 20 August

For the past few days I have been slowly working on the terrain bases for the woodland and marsh pieces. So far I have glued 2mm (for the marshes) and 5mm styrofoam to MDF bases, removed the excess and beveled the edges with a hot-wire cutter, created dimples and puddles by heating the foam with a barbecue gas lighter, painting the MDF on the undersides, corrected the warping caused by the gas lighter and coated the foam with Vallejo dark earth texture paste.

Tomorrow (or possibly later tonight) I will be base-coating the texture and then will focus on the marsh pieces to get them out of the way.

The woodland/forest pieces will take a bit longer as I have all of these cheap trees to "improve":

Although I could just seal them to help stop the existing clump foliage dropping off, they do look a bit plain. My plan is to "highlight" the foliage with some fine flock and to drybrush and wash the trunks. After that they will get a sealing coat of varnish.

Finished: Rock Around The Clock Tonight...

When I suggested that these might be finished yesterday I had forgotten to take into account the effect of temperature on drying times. When I produced the test pieces the ambient temperature was over 30C; it's now just over 20C resulting in longer drying times for glue and paint.

But they are done now, after much faffing around trying to replicate the colour scheme from the test pieces. I've got reasonably close I think:

Test piece in the middle

The paints used for these were all tester pots of matt emulsion paint from Wilko - Vintage Burgundy, Nutmeg Spice, Jelly Bean, Peach Blush and Soft Cream. I now have an 18l Really Useful Box full of terrain for Strontium Dog, which is more than enough to be going on with (OK, maybe a few small scatter pieces of rock could get added at some point).

While I'm still prepping the figures for my "Infamy, Infamy!" project I will be carrying on with making terrain - I need to make up several pieces of woods and marsh. And then a few small fields and habitation (I'll need to get all the resin prepped and painted for those though).

Paint Table Saturday 15 August

A small confession - I haven't done any painting since the hills and rocks. I have been doing some figure prep (the ancient Germans are now done and I have started on the civvies and animals). I've also cut and carved some more foam for rock formations, which have been glued together and onto MDF today:

Tomorrow I will be adding some grit and sand to them and hopefully starting the painting. They should be finished on Monday if all goes well.

Finished: Hills

I should really have posted this yesterday, but forgot. Oh, well, only a day late.

As you can see, I now have a bunch of hills of various sizes to use for various games. Some of the smaller ones might be a little steep, but that's OK with me.

I also made a few small rock formations for my Strontium Dog terrain collection. These were test pieces to see how the colour scheme and carving would work. I reckon they've come out quite nicely.

All in all, not bad for a couple of days' work in this heat. Now that the rock formation tests are done, I'll be making up a few larger pieces over the next few days. I just need to get a couple more tester pots of the base colour.