How Not to Make: Scenics

Well, for the last couple of months this space has been masquerading as a “hobby blog” when really its been little more than “Show and Tell” so today I’m actually going to do a “How To…” post, sort of… If you want to know how to make a big mess…

I’m currently rebasing my trees for Warhammer/LOTR because they were originally based on beer box cardboard which warps like hell and doesn’t stay flat to the table.

So I’ve bought some 5mm foam board, which is being used for my Christmas project and I’m ready to start. I drew around the base of the old piece of scenery, because basically I only wanted to transfer the piece to a new base and give it a fresh coat of paint.

I cut it out and there it is. (BTW that is milliput in that suspicious looking bag) Then I tore the rocks off the old base and transferred them onto the new one, using pva or superglue or whatever came to hand first to glue them down.

I cunningly made my rocks from real rocks I found in the garden. In fact most of them are brick chips from next door’s living room wall (shhhh… don't tell them!") I then filled the gaps with plastercine from the old base and the last of my milliput, like this…

Those splodges are where I had some putty left and so I made “texture” on the base… You can be pretty rough at this stage, you can always fill gaps later with moss or flock or rocks or other stuff. Next I realised I was running low on PVA glue, but instead of stopping and waiting til I bought some more, I just squidged it out all over the base and spread it around with my glue brush. (That is just a standard old brush I use for glue BTW, nothing special)

Pour on a lot of earth flock ((from Gale Force 9… expensive stuff but quite nice) Always do this on paper so you can reuse the excess). I could have painted the base but I was out of Black Primer and almost out of Chocolate Brown. You’ll notice those lovely streaks in the earth, those will disappear eventually as I add new layers of flock and grass. Next I undercoated the rocks in Dark Grey and before waiting for those to dry I threw on some more PVA and added No17 Dark Meadow Flock from Javis.

That is not necessarily the right way to do that! You may have guessed by now, I’m a little impatient when I’m building stuff. I also painted the lip of the base in chocolate brown to match the rest of my scenery. Next I highlighted the rocks with a dry brushed coat of Blue Grey and then I picked out the highlights in White.

Now it was beginning to look kind of alright. My PVA was dry so I couldn't really finish flocking the base. So I decided to use superglue and add a layer of static grass to the rocks. With that done, I reattached the trees and there you have it…

When I get a new batch of PVA I’ll add another layer of grass and earth, I’ll probably give the lip another coat of Chocolate brown and I’ll glue on some fresh reindeer moss growing out of the crevasses in the rocks.

All in all I’m pretty happy with it. It sits perfectly flat on the table and looks a little more realistic than it did before. The trees, BTW are from Javis Scenics, as is the static grass (spring mixture.)

So there you have it, a guide to how not to make wargames scenery. Let me know what you think…