Thanks Tom
Whenever I see dense foam based scenery boards, I wonder if an ice cream scoop would work to help make indents into it.....
Just saying.
Well, I can conclusively report - that doesn't work...
Just bounces off the surface...
Maybe I shoulda tried the blowtorch...
Meanwhile...
The ruin is pretty much finished apart from a couple of Monolith pots and jars, to add some human colour...
There's a good mix of detritus, rubble, fallen timbers, holes in the ground... All the things you need for a bomb damaged property...
Now I can proceed to cement and peg the whole edifice (including its hillock) into position on its baseboard slab. Then that board is ready for terraforming...
Meanwhile, here's the (oasis) first board substantially finished... I will add a little more detail here and there: some further patches of scree and a few low rocky cairns. Partly to provide cover, and partly just for visual interest.
Obviously being the oasis, this board will have a fair amount of scrub and a good scattering of palm trees too, so it will look very much less barren than now.
And for scale, with a German scout car...
Looks quite deserty already, doesn't it? (Well, apart from the occasional blue rock - good old aquarium gravel... )
And now here's the second (wadi) board, seen here halfway 'glooped' and with a sprinkling of sand for added surface texture...
A wadi or donga is basically an old dried-up river bed, so it needs a good sprinkling of rocks and grit, especially along the edges.
You can see how any minor ridges and bumps left on the (now hard) surface of the wall filler substrata disappear beneath the smoothing coat of gloop - even more so once its been liberally sprinkled with patches of fine grit and dusted with sand.
Because the gloop is around 30% PVA, all this scatter material you sprinkle on sticks fast wherever you drop it. Once done, and before painting, I'll probably give the whole thing a thinned down spray coat of PVA to fix everything double-securely. And then a generous car spray paint undercoat, which will fix everything even more. (None of the surface detail on my boards ever goes anywhere, I can promise you... )
Detail of a rocky outcrop or tor:
Start with a couple of irregular lumps of cork, fill in all around with gloop.
Position a few small pieces of slate or other natural stone and bed these down into the wet gloop.
Then slather the whole lot with PVA.
Then add some large grade aquarium gravel around those main pieces, and then some slightly smaller grade railway modelling 'talus'.
Make sure you get some in the cracks between the larger rocks.
Slop on more PVA over the whole lot. Watered down if it helps it sink into all the crevices...
Then add fine grit / ballast around the periphery, and let this small grade material trail off in various directions, as though it's getting washed away from the rock pile...
And don't forget, if you have a pile of rocks on any kind of precipice or cliff, some small pieces will always fall down to the ground below...
Here's the finished wadi board, with some British vehicles for scale...
Finally onto the fourth board - this one will be a hilly area with broken ground, small rock-strewn crevasses and gullies...
The ice cream scoop having failed, the most effective way to dig into the foam is the slash at it with a craft knife, create the rough excavations you want, then go in with the Dremel to open out and smooth off the gouges thus created...
01 June 2007, 05:20:20 PM