Tuesday 21 January 2014

Works in progress

There are a few bits of terrain I am currently working on.

1. A hill. Despite forty years of spoddery I have never built a hill. Instead I have used commercially available ones. However as these were designed for 15mm and I now play only 25/28mm they look a bit sad. So I have started building one.The choice was between a realistic, gradually-sloped one and a steep sided 'step' hill. As figures won't stand on anything but the shallowest slope, instead toppling over or slithering to the bottom, it is a step hill.

It was cut from pink insulating foam - a tenner for a massive sheet from B&Q - and hacked to a rounded shape using a steak knife. Any serrated knife would do. It was then sanded a bit so the edges weren't quite so sudden. As the plan was to spray it with pound shop paint the foam had to be protected from the spray, which would dissolve it. So I covered it with papier mache - specifically painted it with PVA and stuck on torn-up newspaper and painted on more PVA. That took days to dry. After that I sprayed it - the result is below, with a Reaper Bones figure for comparison.


  
2. Some post-apocalyptic ruins. These are quite ambitious and use lots of bits of rubbish. The base is a cork one, £1.20 at the craft shop. The walls are cut from a foamcore sign I found discarded in the forest. Really. They were smeared with a paste made from pound shop pre-mixed filler (a Polyfilla surrogate) and the ubiquitous PVA to make them stronger. It ran on one of the vertical walls, giving a wrinkly appearance, but that is explained away as the plascrete the wall is made of having slightly melted in the heat of a nuclear explosion, fusion gun hit or something along those lines. On the base is corrugated cardboard ( = corrugated iron sheet), bits of sprue ( = fallen steelwork), stones from the side of the road, car repair mesh ( = some sort of wire mesh), the shafts from cotton buds ( = pipes), all embedded in PVA and then more sand ( = general rubble) scattered over. The whole lot was then fixed in place with even more PVA - good job a bottle is only £1 - then left to dry for several days and sprayed with pound shop grey car primer.



3. Barriers of some sort. In the pound shop there were some cheapo Jenga-type blocks. They're smaller than real Jenga ones but much cheaper. I thought they could be some kind of walls or similar. Maybe in several varieties. For example a block clad in corrugated paper and topped with sand held on with PVA might do as a makeshift HESCO type barrier made from two corrugated iron sheets held upright by posts and then filled with sand or earth. A block covered with matchsticks cut to length and topped with sand would be the same but made of wood rather than corrugated iron. Maybe doll's house brick paper, which I think I saw in the craft shop, could be stuck on to represent a brick or stone wall. Covered with PVA and sprinkled with sand they could be cast concrete walls, roadblocks et cetera. And so on. Being the small size they are they could be used in different configurations to be various emplacements, bunkers and similar. This one is still to be fully though out.

4. Storage tanks. These were cheekily knocked together at work. They are toilet roll tubes, the kind from a dispenser rather than the domestic variety, with a circle of cardboard for a top. The inspection hatch, filler ring or whatever on top is the foam circle that you get on a spindle of CDs. That was glued on and the whole lot smuggled out of work. At home the tube was smeared with, you guessed, PVA and corrugated cardboard wrapped around it.  Elastic bands held that in place for a few days until they dried and were sprayed, as below.

Terrain requirements

When building an item of terrain it must fit certain criteria.
1. It must be useable on the table. So, of a certain size if required by the rules set, in my case mainly DBA and Song of Blades and its derivatives.
2. It must be easy to make, as I am not very good at this.
3. It must be tough. Storage space is at a premium so terrain items tend to get thrown into a box at the end of a game. That means brittle, delicate, easily scraped or otherwise fragile items won't survive.
3. Be reasonably realistic looking. However the three points above are of greater importance than this.

Spodilicious: Terrain. Why?


As I've farmed most of my figure-painting out to http://www.ezpainter.co.uk/ I've got a bit of time spare to carry out other spoddy activities. A visit to the pound shop yielded a pile of stuff ideal for terrain building, so I'm about to start that. This blog will cover those activities.

These are some of the bits I'll be using. Vinyl floor tiles; pre-mixed filler; spray paint; corrugated cardboard; 'granny grating', actually from the craft shop; and aluminium mesh from Halfords. Plus of course litres of PVA.