Of Men and Mountains

Helloooo Meestar Creemeens:

I took a look at your lovely mountain pics. Pretty cool. I notice some of the
stuff was done more for looks than game utility. The mountains for
"A
Grey Day To Die" are an important part of the playing board so therefore they
are designed with that in mind. There is only minimal edge scultping because I
didn't want to have problems with trying to march minis up a slope.

I made them out of green R15 insulation - 2" thick styrofoam. I cut the
sheets using a 10" table saw, then did fine sculpts with a hot wire cutter
(thanks Adrian!).

Then I discovered that many conventional paints eat styrofoam. not good.

So I got craft safe black (glossy) paint. I would have preferred matt, but
there was no option locally. So I spray them with a coat of this black. Then I
apply speckle stone (I wanted marble cliffs). This paint normally eats the
foam, but the black primes and protects. The speckle applies not only colour
but texture. I then decide if it'll be a bare hill or a grassy topped one. If
the former, I'm done except for a dullcoat coating. If the latter, I apply a
coating of concentrated artists acrylic brown to the top of the hill and let
it dry (earth). I then coat this area with a mix of white glue and water
(early experiments have used too thin of a mix) and apply grassy flocking.
When this has dried, I dullcoat the entire result.

You end up with either a bare looking marblish rock or you end up with a rock
hill with an earth and grass top. If you knock off some grass flock, you see
the earth below.

The foam was the hard part - getting a rigid enough foam (many foams are
too compressible) and a foam that cuts well and does not suffer from
large-cell-itis. Once I found the right stuff, the rest is fairly
straighforward.

I have plans to build more scenic terrain in future, but this stuff will
provide key terrain for the Lancaster scenario and playability was as
important as looks. Otherwise I would have sculpted the edges of the hills far
more extensively. I wanted them to be (mostly) close to vertical to
indicate steep slopes and to make movement of figures more easy - the
last thing I want is for entire squads to come tumbling down the mountain...

And that, to date, is my experience with hillsides.

One fellow really impressed me with a simple trick for asteroids.

He would spray them lightly with normal spray paint to melt them a bit and
make them craggy, then a "safe" paint, then drybrush. So far, so good.

On a few, after applying the safe paint he'd prick holes with a pencil tip or
needle, then spray more of the normal paint and melt out the inside of the
asteroid. Very neat looking effect when used in moderation.