MOUNTAIN MARK 1

I wanted to make a flexible basic hill I could use with my Lord of the Rings wargames figures on my 4' x 4' gaming board.  I decided make it out of 2 pieces that would fit together to make one large mountain, or could be separated with a gap between them to make a valley type scenario.

 I started off by drawing a hill outline on a piece of paper, and drawing smaller and smaller contours for each step, making sure I left a useful amount of room on each contour so figures could be placed on each level (the games workshop standard figures have a 1" / 25mm base diameter).

Then I cut out all the contours and traced the outline of each one onto the sheet of styrofoam.  The sheets I get are 600mm (approx 24") square from the UK supplier, antenociti's workshop. They're one of the best prices I could find online for styrofoam, and the boards are pre-cut to useful sizes.

I put all the contours close together across one side of the hill, to create a cliff-face kind of thing..

Sorry they're a bit faint, but if you look closely, you'll see each contour is marked out ready for cutting.

Then I cut out all the contours with my trusty hot wire cutter.  If you're going to do any amount of terrain building with styrofoam - GET ONE OF THESE!  You can cut styrofoam quite easily with a stanley knife, but once you've glided smoothly around some styrofoam with a hot wire cutter, you'll wonder why you bothered struggling.  You can pick them up quite cheaply on ebay.

mmm yummy.... hot wire cutter goodness for rapid styrofoam sculpting.

I sanded off the edges of each contour to give them a nice smooth look.
The cliff face is round the back on this photo.

After glueing the contours together with pva glue and waiting for
 it to dry thoroughly,  I sawed through the whole lot with a timber handsaw, and then
glued the whole shebang down onto the base boards, making sure to line up the cut with the
split in the baseboards.  Finally I added some air-drying clay around
each contour and smoothed it in to reduce the appearance of the joins.
I want to keep most of each contour flat so the figures stand nicely on each level.

Next time - my favourite bit - texturing, painting and flocking the hill!