Monday, October 4, 2010

Building some terrain.

Welcome to my first post and for my first posting I thought I would show how I made a small vineyard for our games.
I started off with some 1/8" thick mdf.  I cut out the basic shape and drew on some straight lines to help keep my rows straight.  I then trimmed down some balsa wood for the posts so they were a little shorter than our 15mm figures we use.  I then glued down the posts to the mdf and allowed it dry.  Once that dried I spread some Liquitex Matte Gel onto the board.  I then placed it in a box to collect the mixture of woodland scenics talus and medium ballast.  I then put it aside for 24 hours to dry.
Once the ground cover dried, I then spread some more matte gel in areas and then sprinkled a mixture of woodland scenics flocking onto the base. I tapped off the excess flocking and allowed that dry for 24 hours.  I then took some rope colored sewing thread and glued it to one end of the posts and then stretched it cross a line of posts.  As I pulled the thread taught I glued the thread to the top of the posts.  On the far end I glued down the other end of the thread.  I repeated this two more times.
Once all of this dried, it was time to add the vines.  I had looked at a few different websites before I started this and wanted to do some thing a little easier then some of the examples I had read about.  So I started with some woodland scenics lichen.  I tore some apart and glued it down to the base and then glued the strands to the thread.
I repeated this process for each little section until I was done.  I have to say this process slowed me down as I actually got picky as to how the lichen looked and tested each piece in the area before I glued it in place.
After about a two hours of picking through pieces of lichen, I finally finished it.
Here's the finished product with a stand of figures in the middle of it.
Here's a picture of it on the gaming table.  Its not perfect but it works and was relatively inexpensive.

3 comments:

  1. Very nice tutorial. And a great way to statrt off your blog. I've been wanting to make a vineyard for some time. I'm going to have to give this a try. A little off topic question: What is the black tank in the background on the right side in the 1st pic?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks guys for the comments.

    LuckyJoe, The tank you asked about is a British Mk IV Male.

    ReplyDelete