THE SCHOOL PROJECT... PART 2

Boy 2 goes back to school tomorrow, so it has been all hands to the deck to get Helvellyn finished.

halfway through hotwire cutting out the contours

all contours done - next job glueing

All glued last night, and the glue was dry enough to paint it at lunchtime today.
I've had to cut a few corners to make sure we get it done in time.
It would have been nice to texture and flock it, but I can't see that happening now.

THE SCHOOL PROJECT...

Boy 2, our 8 year old, has been given a project to do over the Easter break.  He has to do a study on a mountain. It could be a picture, a poster, some interesting facts... but no, our little guy has decided he wants to make a model.  Proud dad moment :-)  He knows about Helvellyn (Lake District, UK, 3117 ft) because I've enthused about it, having climbed it a few times. So he's decided he wants a model Helvellyn to take to school at the start of summer term next week.  Time to get out the styrofoam and hot-wire cutter again...

After a bit of googling for source material, I had something to go on...

I printed out an enlarged OS map of the contours for Helvellyn, scaled to fit on one of my 12" square hardboard terrain bases.  Boy 2 then carefully traced each contour line, making sure each one was a complete circuit (it gets a bit tricky under the wording on the map).  Then I followed my previous procedure for transferring the contours onto styrofoam.  Draw round the outermost contour, then carefully cut it off; draw round the next contour, then carefully cut it off; etc, etc.

Below you can see the completed contours 1 and 2 (there are going to be 11 in total on this one!)  -  which introduced another problem.  My styrofoam is 1" thick (25mm).  If I were to make each contour 1" thick, the whole thing would be 11" high.  For a 12" square base, this would be a rather ridiculous vertical stretch.  I couldn't be bothered with doing the maths to get the correct thickness of contours for the base size I'm using, so in the end I just decided to saw each styrofoam block thickness in half (not an easy job to keep it straight with a handsaw) to give each contour a thickness of approx 10-12mm (I did wobble somewhat).  The whole thing should now be only 5 and a half inches high when finished, which is a lot better, but still too high.  However, this is a primary school project, not a to-scale model of the whole lake district... hmmmm.... a to-scale model of the whole lake district.... now there's an idea..... :-)

FLOCK ON...

The time has come to do the bit I enjoy most about building terrain.  The grassing and flocking.

One thing I have never got into, and that's making my own scatter and flock material.  I know some scratch builders would scoff at the fact I buy mine all pre-made and packaged, but hey, making the stuff would bore the pants off me.  I just want to do the fun stuff.  Judging by my collection, scatter is made (I'm guessing) from dyed sawdust, or dyed sponge, chopped up very small, but to be honest, I don't actually care.  I've also got that model-railway favourite, reindeer moss, or lichen. 

A good rule of thumb I always work to is to build the vegetation up in layers, starting at the deepest undergrowth and working up to the top.  I've started with a patchy layer of mainly dark brown scatter, which has got nice bits of organic 'stuff' in it, I find this makes a good ground cover to work up from.  Using pva glue again, I liberally paint random patches where I want this layer to be, and then sprinkle the scatter over the glue, and leave to dry before shaking off the excess onto newspaper and pouring it back in the pack.

I bought a lot of my scatter packs from an ebay seller who crops up from time to time, called forgedinblood. He gives them all evocative names like 'orc scrubland', 'lothlorien', 'old world woods', 'hobbit meadow' and 'emerald elf havens' and it makes me go all misty eyed and want to start throwing money at the screen.

The rest of it comes mainly from antenociti's workshop, which is a good online shop with a wide range of scratchbuilding materials from the major suppliers (woodland scenics, silflor, noch, etc, and they do a limited range of their own brand (decorplus) which is reasonably priced.  Most of the stuff in the foreground of the pic below is forgedinblood stuff, with some antenociti packs in there as well.  If you're vaguely interested in doing any terrain building of your own, go have a rummage through antenociti's scratchbuilding paradise (http://www.antenocitisworkshop.com/), it's very inspiring.  My most recent acquisition is a pack of pre-formed trailing ivy for spreading across ancient ruined walls (and non-ruined, but if I'm making it, you can bet it will probably be ruined).  You can see the rectangular pack peeping out at the back of the table on the far left, just in front of some clump foliage I use for trees.  For the amount you get it costs a *#! fortune, but it looks totally awesome - every little ivy leaf is individually formed. I'm saving it for a particularly spectacular ruin.

Back to the mountain - the layers go on one at a time, same process as the first, with a complete drying time inbetween each.

some 'bramble' scatter (ground up spongey stuff from antenociti)

both pieces together with bramble scatter - and boy #2's homework and spud gun

with the static grass to finish it off.

Since I built this piece, I bought my static grass applicator (the large metal sieve thing - see CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS) which I have yet to try out.  The idea is this - instead of just sprinkling on the static grass like normal scatter (as I have done on this mountain), after you've painted on your pva glue, you tap a small pin nail into the centre of the area you've just glued.  The applicator has an earth wire that clips onto the pin, and a battery inside the handle creates a static charge on the grass in the sieve. Then you shake the grass onto the glue through the sieve, and the static charge makes all the blades of grass stand on end as they land on the pva glue, making it look like the grass is growing up out of the board - like real grass!  I have seen youtube clips of this being done, and it looks amazing.  I'll let you know how I get on once I've had a go with mine....

Another thing I want to do is buy some different lengths of static grass. The stuff I'm using is all the same length and the grass ends up looking like a golf green.  The figures stand nicely on it for wargaming, but it offends my sense of aesthetics. I want the grass to look a little more, well, mountain-y.

Next time - something a little different.  I bought a set of resin-cast pieces to make a medieval tavern diorama which I have recently finished painting, and they look rather good if I do say so myself. Here's some of them just after undercoating:

MOUNTAIN MARK 1 PART TWO

Mountains made for gaming with never look like real mountains.  You need to have flat areas on which to put the figures, and the steps all occur very sharply to mark out clearly where climb rolls need to be made.

But despite that, I want to make my mountain look as good as it can.  The vertical sections I've decided are exposed rock, so I want to create a rocky texture on these bits.

 

To do this, I liberally coat all the vertical sections with pva glue and then sprinkle on some texturing talus.  The stuff I've used here is very finely ground-up cork (I get mine from antenociti's workshop - decorplus extrafine cork, £2.75 for a large yoghurt pot sized tub).  It weighs practically nothing but looks like rubble.  Once it's completely dried,  I knock off the excess onto a sheet of newspaper and pour back into the pot for re-use.  

Next, it's time to undercoat.  I've used a dark brown to completely cover the whole piece.

 

This helps keep the talus adhered to the piece as well as giving me a nice earth brown underlay for the grass and flocking.  Next I undercoat all the vertical sections of exposed rock in a mid grey (this is anita's acrylic, 59ml pot, charcoal grey)

And then to bring out a bit of detail, I drybrush a lighter grey (anita's acrylic again, dove grey) over the top.  If you've not tried drybrushing, it's a great effect that I use all the time to bring out raised/bumpy bits on any piece, scenery or figures.  You dip your paintbrush into the paint, then brush it off again on a piece of scrap newspaper (sounds odd, but go with it)  then you lightly brush the brush over the piece, a small area at a time, and the raised bumps and ridges will pick up flecks of paint whilst leaving the dips and crevices in the darker colour.  You need to be patient, and don't be tempted to leave some paint on the brush to speed things up, you'll only end up painting into the dips and lose the effect.

Here's a close-up of the cliff, basecoast + dry-brushing on the left, just the darker grey basecoat on the right. It's a simple technique, but I find it really brings things to life.  That's the painting complete now - time to add the flocking!  I'll do that on the next post.

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!

CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS

As anyone who has spent any time rummaging around t'interweb will know, there are myriad different suppliers of myriad different brands of materials with which to make terrain.  Also, there are myriad different ways of making terrain.  I can only show you my way.  It may not be the best way, but it is the way I know best.

I use hardboard bases - I buy mine as a single 8' x 4' board from a local timber merchant, who happily cut it down to more useable sizes (12" square).  The next most important material is extruded polystyrene. Note this is not *expanded* polystyrene (the stuff made of little white bubbles). It is best known under the brand name styrofoam, which is usually light blue in colour.

It is great stuff for building - it is reasonably robust (as long as you don't bash it - you can dent it with a fingernail if you push too hard), very lightweight, you can cut it very easily (more on that later) and you can sand it too.  It comes pre-cut in various thicknesses (25mm/1" ; 50mm/2" ; 75mm/3"), but I use the 25mm thickness, simply because it makes a useful 'step' size for wargaming in games workshop figure size (28mm).

I have a box of goodies that I keep all my terrain modelling stuff in.  It's not big enough for my hot-wire cutter or my electrostatic grass applicator (technically tools of the trade, admittedly, but I bought them after I'd made my hobby box). I rarely get the opportunity to unpack the lot, but the kitchen table was vacant for a good deal of the morning, so I here you go:

I'll go through this merry little lot in more detail at a later time, but you can download a high-res version of the pic (as you can with all the pics on my blog) by clicking on it.

Enough scratchbuilding stuff for trees, rocks, bushes, grass and anything else you can shake a terrain stick at.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

One of the problems I have with a hobby like mine, is that of space.  Or lack of it.  With a wife, three boys (13, 8 and 3) and a dog, and one kitchen table on which to eat, do homework, dump bags, use laptop, space is always at an absolute premium!

If I wanted to be able to enjoy my hobby with any regularity, I'd have to find a way of quickly and easily storing and getting out my paraphernalia with minimum fuss.  I couldn't find any commercially available storage solutions that suited everything I wanted, so I invented and built my own custom hobby box:

It's made from 10mm plywood, glued and screwed together with the lid piano hinged across the back.  The stays and supports for the paint brushes, files and paintpots on the lid are fashioned from hardboard.

The blue block of foam on the lid holds my water cup in place in the lower tray during transportation (whilst it is possible to transport the box with the water cup filled, I found this to be a dangerous thing to do with any regularity); and my clippers, which are suspended on a couple of bent nails.

The paint pots sit in a little custom-fit tray, and are held in place by a line of elastic, so I can pop them in and out easily *and* they all stay in place when I close the lid.  Score.

The lower tray is split into three sections - the left hand side has matches (for paint mixing); long nose tweezers; blu-tac; pva glue, some 59ml paint pots and my can of spray undercoat.  I like games workshop chaos black for an even, matt finish undercoat which takes all my acrylics very well.

The right hand section of the lower tray holds some more 59ml acrylic paint pots; a bag of gravel and bag of static grass for basing; and my water cup, which sits in a little compartment of its own to keep it from spilling.

The centre section has an upper and lower compartment.  The upper part holds my mixing palette, a couple of sheets of newspaper and some tissues for brush cleaning. Underneath the black felt-lined separator, I have cut some rows of foam between which I sandwich figures and pieces I am currently working on.

It does its job very nicely (if I do say so myself).  I can get it out, open it up, and within a minute I'm up and running with everything I need ready and to hand.  And with a minute's notice, I can pack it all up and put it away and the kitchen table is ready for its next mission.  Unfortunately, the lid is quite sturdy too, and it can take things being stacked upon it very well - which makes life more difficult getting it out next time!