Some of the stuff that I’ve written about here would qualify as somewhat difficult to create, depending on your skill level in this hobby. So, I thought I would write about something that every wargamer has wanted on his or her game table, and that’s hills. When I am wanting hills, I don’t usually make one at a time, because of the time consumed not being worth it for only one hill. So we usually do these in “sets” and make a handful of them at a time. This starts by going and grabbing scraps of polystyrene from our pile. A small side note on this, we usually keep a good chunk of scraps laying around for the sake of projects like this, polystyrene (housing insulation) always has a use here and there, and even though it has some drawbacks, the benefits outweigh them by a large margin.
In this case we were able to just cut some “round” shapes out of the foam we had and it resulted in the image above. After we cut out the rough shapes we used a hot wire cutter to sculpt the edges to resemble a rocky surface along the edge. This will be easier to see in the pictures below, I don’t have a picture of this with out paint on them, sorry.
Each piece of foam got a fresh base coat of black. The reason we used this color is that we are trying to present, the non-flock covered areas as rock, so we generally start out dark and build up the color from there.
After a thorough coating of black, each piece goes through a couple stages of dry brushing. This starts with a Dark Grey, moves to a Light Grey, and then to a white. Something you’ll notice is that the flat surfaces of each hill don’t look particularly good, that’s because we knew that it would be covered with flock and static grass, alleviating the need for a better quality paint job.
After all the paint was dry we took the time to do the same flocking process as the Static Grass Board went through. That means we sprinkled a small amount of Brown and Grey flock onto the still wet an drying static grass. See the previous article on this for more detail. All in all this set provides us with some elevation in our games which is always something that I look forward to in games.
Sorry if this is a dumb question:
Where do you find Foamcore that you can use for terrain. I live out in California and no one carries the insulation Pink/Blue foam and I was wondering if there was a place for online ordering and what sorta prices should one expect?
thanks
any help would be awesome.
btw: Your blog is great and has given me a lot of ideas.
It’s not really a dumb question, I’ve seen this topic come up before with people in california not being able to find polystyrene in that state. From what I understand, california has laws against using that particular material for home insulation, which means most hardware stores and distributors wont have any. One alternative to this is the less desirable packaging foam that is used to package all kinds of appliances and products, like this.
but that all comes in pre-determined shapes and is a bit tougher to deal with and almost impossible to sand.
The other possibility is to go to a local lowes, home depot, etc and see if you can have them order some for you since they dont carry it. Otherwise, I really don’t have a whole lot of advise since this stuff is readily available at multiple locations here in our area.
Hope that helps,
Bill