Starting a fresh fantasy terrain set part one - scatter terrain

Recently I played in the Dutch Bloodstorm AoS event and won the Sportsmanship Award. Besides making me smile it came with a certificate and a brand new gaming mat. This last bit has to be celebrated! So this weekend I started building a brand new terrain set to go with it. The 'I have to start scratch building some fantasy stuff'-itch that has been flaring up lately helped a lot. So to start with the ending I went ahead and made a bunch of scatter terrain. Here are some completed project pictures. WIP and a lot of 'how I did it' rambling will follow lower in this post.

The good, the bad and the orky...

I am planning to build a number of brand new single base buildings that can be used for a village or town setting. The start of any building project is with sketches after which I make a plan for a number of MDF bases. Cutting these out always leaves a lot of spare bits of MDF which I picked up and used to make the terrain above. Let's have a closer look at the painted stuff before blabbing about details.

Sigmar ordered me to hold this fence at all cost!

Some dead trees and a couple of rows of hedges. Maybe I should make a few more hedge bases just to be sure. 

Ever since I discovered these parts fit, I had to glue this magic circle to a base...

I just love this guy's pose, I always start humming 'Stand And Deliver' by Adam & the Ants when I see him.

So back to the beginning. I always start with sketches, but I'll talk more about them when I actually get around to finishing some buildings (and writing about that). To start this process off I wanted to make some scatter terrain. There is a good reason to start with this. I usually keep building until I get bored and annoyed by the process, leaving one building half finished and forgotten in the shed. If I don't make scatter terrain first, it never gets made. A pity because it's the easiest part of any built and it ties anything else you make together.

The basics for any good build: a jigsaw, an automatic sander and lots of MDF.

The projects starts with a jigsaw, an automatic sander and lots of MDF. After cutting out many larger bases meant for buildings I end up with a lot of cut-offs on the ground. I picked these up, cut them to practical looking size for scatter terrain and uses the sander to take the roughest edges off. For my first projects I used to sand the sides down to a slope, but I find it's more effort then it's worth. These days I just sand and paint the straighter edges and it looks fine on the table.

The good, the bad and the orky join me to help determine proper sizes.

The next step consist of assembling a crew to size up the terrain during the build. This is extremely important if you don't want to end up with humongous (or tiny) walls. I picked an ancient Realm of Chaos era thug, because I like him, an Orruk because he has a mid-to-large size infantry body and a Stormcast because these guys are huge (for semi-regular fantasy infantry). All of these have to scale reasonably well with whatever I throw together (not the Stormcast he's allowed a bit of looming space).

Think it looks like a mess now, just wait until I really get started building stuff.

The next step consists of re-reading bits in the old How to Make Wargames Terrain books. Sure I should be able to dream everything in there around now, but it's motivating and inspiring to browse through them anyway. I also managed to locate most of my over-elaborate polystyrene cutting gear including...

I don't think my polystyrene cutter was a very good investment, but I'm still happy I have it.

The cutting machine itself! I've managed not to lose it during the move. As an aside. Welcome to the new shed. I've recently added a workspace here to my regular painting workspace inside the house. Making terrain is a dirty, smelly business so having a space outside to do it in is very pleasant for both me and the rest of the household.

Here's the start of some interesting walls.

For the walls I started off cutting some 1 cm thick strips of polystyrene off a larger block. I don't want to cut individual blocks for the wall because I hold what's left of my sanity dear. Also it should make the entire bit of terrain slightly sturdier.

Anybody there on the other side?

Next step is testing the strips for height. In this case the Orruk and Thug both struggle to look over the wall on its planned base, so I need to make it lower.

That's better.

I take a wild guess and go for half the size. There that is a lot better. Yes the wall is rather low now, but I think optically it works out okay. I want to see my miniatures while playing and this bit of terrain should not block line of sight as it is just there to provide a bonus to cover.

Just draw on some brick shapes, no problem.

The next step is a fun and easy one. I used a slightly blunt pencil to draw stone shapes on the polystyrene. The indentations serve as the basic brick shape. Above a quick view of an old building I tried (and failed) to use for sizing purposes. I used a hobby knife to cut half bricks off and to cut the strips of brick to size. If you don't own a fancy-shmancy polystyrene cutting machine, a hobby knife serves just as wel, provided you bring plenty of sharp blades.

All in all you're just a...nother brick in the wall....

Next I used a hot glue gun to glue to bits of stonework to their wooden bases. Also never mind the slightly larger stones (extremely) visible on the picture above, I'll bury part of these in sand so it shouldn't be too noticeable.

I added some empty bases and some fences, was too engrossed in sticking coffee stirrers together to remember to take pictures.

With the brick walls done it was time to get a few extra easy bits of scatter terrain out of the way as wel. I used bits of balsa wood and coffee stirrers to add some fences to the lot (I was just watching Pickett's Charge on a Gettysburg documentary so I decided a fence should be added to the stone walls set). I also sanded a few empty bases to hold hedges later on and used some (saved up just for this occasion) twigs to add scattered piles of wood.

After about a decade of being ignored, the fake pine trees sought comfort in each other's embraces.

As there still was plenty of daylight left, and all the glue on above bases had to dry anyway, I decided to grab an old cd-tube filled with railroad scale pine trees. I bought these when I had just re-entered the hobby and glued them onto 25mm bases. Bad idea. It didn't matter where you measured on the table, at least four trees would fall over every time. So these have been sitting in storage, waiting for the day I found a use for them. Today was that day...

The MDF as is, might be slightly too large to serve as a base for a single tree.

I held one onto the spare bit of MDF, but I know from experience that just gluing railroad trees to sanded MDF looks pretty silly. First off, I measured out four bases to be filled with trees then I went back to the polystyrene cutter for some fancier work.

Step one: cut some nice shapes to make the bases a bit more irregular in size (should also block line of sight)

I cut some interesting polystyrene shapes and jigsawed and sanded four extra bases to glue them to. I took care to vary the height on the bases. In front is a pretty intimidating metal wire brush for the next step (after sticking the polystyrene on with hot glue).

Step two: use a wire brush to demolish any pretty round line in sight. 

Using the wire brush with a smattering of care I sanded down the smooth cuts achieved by the hot wire cutter. I want it to look like rocks at some point and this was a good start.

People tend to make trees that can be removed from bases, I think it is an old instinct from when trees where area terrain and anyone could enter. These days if a model can't fit into the base, it has no business being there.

Next up I PVA glued some actual ornamental rocks to the bases. I use these to break up the monotonous shapes and to cleverly fill any obvious gaps on the different levels. After this I used a glue brush to cover all the bits of the base I want to hold sand with a fresh layer of PVA glue. This has the added bonus of making everything else stick on that much better.

Not my best picture ever, these look really interesting in real life. Hopefully some 'after painting' pictures will do them more justice.

With the PVA and sand still wet I added a small dollop of hot glue to the base of each tree and stuck these into the sand. Now all I have to do is wait and paint them at some later stage.

I just had to do this. Not a hell of a lot of time was lost because I did it.

I also had one of those odd flashes of inspiration and stuck a few bits from a basing kit together on a spare bit of MDF.

Splashed on cheap paint for terrain, decided that the paint sucks.

For the next step I covered the walls with a mixture of cheap grey paint and PVA. The bases where covered with a cheap burnt umber paint and PVA mixture. After drying I decided that the cheap paint sucked for my purposes...

Went inside and used proper paint, that's better...

So I brought the lot inside and used Dryad Bark Air paint to paint the bases (I left the cheap grey on the stones).

Painting empty bases feels really lazy.

More bases were painted with Dryad Bark. After this process all bases where drybrushed Talarn Sand and finally Karak Stone

The walls are starting to look like actual walls.

Next was a quick drybrush of Stomvermin Fur on the stones, followed by a quick mix Stormvermin Fur with a touch of white. The fences where painted with Steel Legion Drab and then drybrushed along with the sand on the base. I picked out a few smaller stones on the different bases with Eshin Grey and wetbrushed* (*drybrushing for impatient people) these with Stormvermin Fur. After all had dried, I flocked the bases with an old Games Workshop dark green flock and patches of a brighter green flock (I actually can't remember where this is from). I added Iceland Moss to the empty bases to make hedges and had a bit of fun painting the magic circle with Sotek Green and Hashut Copper. The dead wood was painted Dryad Bark with the base and then alternately stippled and drybrushed with any flat looking green I could find (Straken Green, Loren Forest, Deadworld Forest and a few others).

There it is, a finished set of scatter terrain

And here I am with a nice set of scatter terrain to add to my table. The walls aren't very tough, I would give them a maximum lifespan of 6 months as club terrain. So I think I'll keep them at home (for now). All in all it is a nice start and as soon as I've finished the four bases with trees it's almost enough to fill a table (especially as I have some houses to add to this already). But I have given in to the building itch, I now need more.

Opening my sketches for terrain and dropping my overtly ambitious amount of bases on the table.

As a quick outro here is the table in the shed. It contains the MDF bases I cut to use for houses and a few pages of wild sketches I made using a nice illustration book I'll blab about some other time.

Drawing floor plans on the biggest of the bases, using the sketchbook I used to steal ideas as a guide.

As a final step I've started sketching out floor plans onto the biggest bases to map out three larger buildings I plan to start with. It's going to be a fun couple of weeks I think...