The Hills are alive...with the sound of polysterene

Hi Folks

I decided that I wanted to build some terrain over the weekend - afterall it was my birthday weekend and aside from too much beer watching the rugby Mrs Shed said I could do what I wanted.

Now if you have been following my blog over the last couple of years you will have seen that many of my games are rather flat. I decided that I needed some hills.

All of my terrain is either designed to sit on the table or mounted on 9mm MDF boards that are either 25cm or 50cm square. The hills would be built on these boards. Fortunately I had two squares left from my desert boards and one rectangular piece. This would be very much a trial and error project. If it works I'll produce some more.

The starting point would be to create one hill - either stretching I metre in length or 75cm. in other words it will be made of two pieces. To get a clean join I needed to create a template from a timber batten.

Once cut out using my trusty jig saw these battens were screwed to the boards.

 One batten was saved for future hills !!

As you can see in the picture below these two battens then butt up against each other

Next up was to cut the hills from polystyrene using the sculpting tool to get a shallow angle

As you can see the smaller piece is being done at the same time.

The polystyrene was fixed to the mdf boards using interior grab adhesive.

I steadily built up the hills. The one ion the foreground is slightly higher than the one in the background

A view of the slope...

Yes its steep but the 28mm figure is not going to fall down..

With the polystyrene cut and glued I covered the whole thing in filler - a wet goat all over and then more filler around the joins. This was then lefty to dry over night.

The following morning saw the boards painted a chocolate brown acrylic.

And the final job top cover all the hills in static grass using a pva glue. This used four bags of static grass. Although darker than my normal base boards it should fade in time.

As you can see in the pictures above these hills look the part if a little angular. If I build more I will be looking for a much smoother finish.

I will make up a ridge section to sit inside these two hills (battens at both ends) plus a couple of hills that sit on their own 50cm square bases. That however will be set for another day.

Until next time...