Crumbling Wall: Scatter Terrain

Crumbling Wall: Scatter Terrain (WIP)

I tossed together a simple piece of terrain for whichever game I'm using at the time.  Let's do like a tv chef and show the finished project to start with:

This is a pretty simple piece really.  I'm not done painting.  Really the sand and rocks will end up painted.  This helps to make it jump a bit more, and actually helps to keep the bits on the base.  I'll go through how I made it quickly for those of you who are interested.

The wall is made from wallboard insulation panels.  These are readily available at hardware type stores.  Alternatively you could use whatever hard foam you can get.

I like to cut my foan with a wire cutter.  These are just a wire that heats up, and slices through the foam like butter.  If you can find a cheap one I would highly reccomend it.  Compared to the alternative it is almost an essential.  The alternative being cutting with a hobby knife or other knife.

For this wall I cut out a larger piece to the overall shape that I wanted, and then cut it into smaller brick sized pieces.  The other option would be to make a pile like the above and just glue them into a shape you like.  I used hot glue to glue them down onto a base made of foamcore.  You can make nice curves, or gaps for firing maybe.  I have some ideas for a fun twisting line to make a military gun fort that has been commandeered (I had to look up the spelling of that one;P) and in the middle of the city.  You could use white glue if you want, but hot glue is perfect for this kind of job.  It sets up quickly, but gives you a small window to move things.  The problem with PVA (white glue) is the slower time to set up.  Once it dries it would be fine, but it will be more difficult to set up in the first place.

You might have noticed that the front of the wall has some deep pitting and texturing that isn't like what you easily achieve.  I painstakingly sat down and carved every texture and contour.  Ok, that's a lie.  I estimate that this part of the project took approx. 30 seconds for real!  I took advantage of Spray paint and their tendency to melt foam when you spray them on.  You don't want to get too close, or it

will melt your whole block, and you don't want to get too far away or it won't melt at all.  My suggestion is to play around with it on some scrap pieces.  Make sure that you give it a few hours to sit before painting, because sometimes the foam keeps melting a bit.  Remember that you can always give it another millisecond spray, but you can't remake it without a fair bit of work if you melt too much.

At this point I painted the rocks.  Very simply I used a black base coat.  Then a dark grey pool, and a white pool on my pallete.  I mixed increasing amounts of white in and drybrushed it on.  A quick and dirty paintjob, but this was a quick project.

Finally I added some texture to the base.  I painted on White glue, and added my mix of sands, kitty litter, small rocks and gravel, and some tiny shredded cork "rocks."  The larger rocks were glued down with hot glue before sprinkling the rest on.  I like to give it a blast of 'spray adhesive' before painting.  I will probably just pain it in shades of brown with some patches of weathering if I feel ambitious.  

This project was just a tossed together piece in between other things.  While waiting for paint to dry, or other inevitable waiting parts of the hobby, I like to pick up something and try to make something out of it instead of just waiting.  I figure that there is about an hour worth of work in this piece, and probably 10 minutes to finish painting the ground and add some lichen in the cracks.

Here is a hill that I made out of the same foam.  The 'grass' areas are shredded aspen from my wife's leopard gecko vivarium.  I just painted it up with a few shades of green and did a highlight with drybrushing.  I need to fix the side.  My son got enthusiastic with the drybrushing!!

Here are some miniatures for a size comarison.

The ethereal and the squad captain are giving the firewarrior breacher squad their briefing before going out and kicking ass.  These models were just the closest to hand, and aren't finished yet.

Hopefully that helps people comel up with some ideas.  I know that for me the hardest thing is to come up with an idea that I can build on.  Once the initial idea is there it is easy to build on it and add some embellishments.

In other news, my box of Operation: Icestorm arrived today.  I'm going to take some pictures, and get a first impressions review up.  As a quickie, I will say that I really love the art that they use.  The world is beautiful and is a fertile playground for the imagination.  Good stuff!

- Brandon.