Wargames Wasteland HQ (Part 15 - Scenics: Small hills)

More work has been done on the ever-growing gaming table project!

Also, as a matter of interest, this is my 400th published blog post!

This time, I've turned my attention to producing some hills.

Love 'em or loathe 'em, I've gone for the "tiered-hill" approach.

Sure - they don't look very realistic, but at least the models will stand on them without toppling. I find that infuriating, personally. My gaming surface is fairly hard and a lot of my models are lead (and Gravity is a long-standing nemesis of mine and takes every opportunity to stitch me up): I didn't want my models rolling off and getting dinged and damaged.

So, tiered hills it is.

I've split my hill-building efforts over two blog posts - this one showing "smaller" hills and the other showing "larger" hills.

Single-tier hills

Two-tier hills

These are just made from polystyrene sheets (bought from a local DIY store and intended for use as insulation). They some as 8' x 4' sheets and cut readily with a knife and hot-wire cutter. Textured, painted and flocked using my usual recipe and they blend in to the table surface pretty well, I think.

More scenery stuff:
More wargames table stuff:

Nurgle Knight Titans - Part 15 (Fourth Knight Finished)

Papa Nurgle is back with more corrupty-goodness!

He's corrupted another Imperial Knight to join the ranks of House Putrefacio.

This time it's the first of a pair of Armiger Helverins that I picked up when they were released.

I like these guys. In fact, I think if I was a pilot of a Knight I'd prefer one of these to their bigger cousins.

More Nurgle Knights stuff:

Wargames Wasteland HQ (Part 14 - Scenics: Difficult Ground)

The scenery train keeps on rolling.

We've built some "difficult ground" bases to represent broken, rocky terrain.

Hardboard bases were dressed with chunks of foam to represent larger rocks, gravel and sand. Painted with a mix of PVA/Black Emulsion/sharp-sand to add texture. Another coat of black paint, grey paint to pick up the larger rocks and then heavily drybrushed with white paint.

Add modelling snow (a.k.a. sodium bicarbonate), static grass and "Bob's your uncle!" as the saying goes.

More scenery stuff:
More wargames table stuff:

Wargames Wasteland HQ (Part 13 - Scenics: Craters)

I've built a few more scenery pieces to add to my growing collection. This time it's craters.

Construction was as simple as can be: A hardboard base, to which I added a thick ring of PVA glue and laid on top of that a ring of gravel. When dried, I added another layer of PVA and another ring of gravel.

When that was dry, I smothered the gravel in PVA and scattered on some sand, massaging it into the cracks with my fingertips.

When that was dry, I painted the whole thing with a mix of black emulsion, PVA and sand to add texture to the whole base area.

A bit of drybrushing and some paint/snow/static grass and the result is as shown below:

More scenery stuff:
More wargames table stuff:

Wargames Wasteland HQ (Part 12 - Scenics: Rocks)

Now that I have a gaming surface I'd better add some dimension to it, right? To that end, I've made a few rocky outcroppings for my growing scenery collection.

Unfortunately, my hurriedly-taken photos were a bit pants, so I can't show them all to you on this pass. I'll retake some newer pics and show you the others on another occasion.

The same method was used throughout:

• Cut a hardboard base, 
• PVA some randomly snapped chunks of polystyrene to it,
• Hot-wire cut the polystyrene into a "rocky" sort of shape,
• Add some gravel to the base for texture,
• Paint the whole model in a couple of coats of black emulsion mixed with PVA & sharp-sand,
• Paint the rocks grey,
• Drybrush the hell out of it,
• Add snow/static grass & clump foliage to taste.

Sorry about the blurry photo

More scenery stuff:
More wargames table stuff: