Tag-Teaming Some Terrain Projects

     So my actual hobby interest has been at an all time low the past month or so. I have not been working on anything of any real interest so I have not been posting all that much. Recently Evil Homer approached me and asked if I would help him with some terrain he was making. He has a lot of Hirst Arts molds and he likes to cast and build. For the most part he does not mind painting terrain. The thing is he either is not happy with his ground work or not entirely sure how to approach it.Either way he decided to ask me if I would help him out by working the basing.

      This should be a two part post maybe three if I can get Evil Homer to cooperate. He built the terrain. I am doing the preliminary basing. Then he is going to paint them and return them to me so I can do the green work afterwords. If I can get him to take some WIP shots as he is painting maybe I can write up some of that for you as well. Regardless you should see a second post in the near future when I do the green work after it is all painted. 

     I decided to try a slightly different approach with this terrain than I normally take. Normally I simply squeeze some glue out in places and pile on some gravel. Then I spread glue out over the entire base and cover it with sand. Plain and simple. Since Evil Homer took the time to make some fairly nice looking pieces I thought I would take it a bit further on this. On one hand it was actually a bit easier and I think I got a better result. On the other hand one of the steps I added required a day of drying time so I had to space out my work.

     As you can see in the pictures above, Evil Homer has some broken down ruins that he constructed out of blocks made from Hirst Arts molds. Those molds are great, but the casting can be time consuming. In addition when you are working with ruins like this the bricks can look out of place if you don't treat the area around them properly. Since the eventual look he is going for is "over-grown" ruins I thought it would not look right with the square sides of some of the brick sticking nicely out of the grass/dirt. So I decided to treat the base around the ruins with the some drywall patching material to build it up. This will create a slope from the base to the bricks that should look like dirt and grass growing/building up around it.

     Above there is a group shot once I had them all spackled. The bottom one a close up so you can hopefully see what I did. There is no real science to what I did here. I simply spread the spackle out along the edges of the brick work where I wanted the slope at. Some areas got more, some got less. Pretty much like salt...season to taste. I went through three different tools to spread the spackle and ended up using the ones god gave me. I figured out a gloved hand worked the best as it gave me the best control of the spackle and did not leave any hard edges that needed to be smoothed out. At this point all the pieces needed to be set aside to dry.

      I want to apologize now that I do not have some additional in process shots for you. You see I wanted to get this done so I can get it back to Evil Homer, and I completely forgot to take some shots to show you exactly what I did. I promise if the end result works the way I hope I will definitely do a more detailed post telling you how.

     After the spackle dried, I coated the entire base with glue. The area were I wanted to add bigger gravel for rubble got an extra shot of glue right before I hit the base with material. I added the piles of of rubble where the extra glue was, I then sprinkled a few loose pieces of bigger gravel around the base and then the whole thing was covered in sand. Normally that was several steps, but this way I did not have to worry about leaving a ridge where the sand met up with the gravel. In addition the sand fills in any areas where the glue is between the rocks and kinda pulls it together.

     After this it is back to Evil Homer for painting. Here is another group shot after the sand/gravel and a couple of close up shots of one of the pieces.