Making cliffs and hills - a Tutorial

Last week I worked on several cliffs for our gaming club. I did a little tutorial for those of you readers that might be interested in expanding your collection of terrain with very little investment, and to a great result.

The materials used are:
- Thick cardboard
- Expansive Foam (polyurethane)
- Paper glue and gardening dirt (for the texture)
- Paints and flocking

First, I cut the cardboard in some random shape. I did 7 pieces in total, and made them all distinct in both size and shape.

Next, I applied the expansive foam. As the name suggests, the product inflates quite a bit. Once dry it ends up ocuppying an area about 3x larger. The borders of the foam are dry enough to start working on after about 40min. Its not necessary to apply glue to the cardboard, just use the foam right over it, and it will stick to the cardboard as it dries.

What we do then is probably the only step in this tutorial that actually requires some skill. We need to carve the foam into the shape we want our cliffs/hills to have. As can be seen below, I did them with mostly vertical borders and plain top, which allow for easy placement of models.

It's important to carve away all the original surface of the foam, for it has a very polished finish, and the texture can't get a hold on that.

(The WIP cliffs next to an also WIP scifi soldier, for size comparison)

Once all the carving is done and we're happy with the shape of our pieces, it's time to apply the texture. I've already made a tutorial on how to do the texture, so you can take a look at that here.

I then let it dry over a day. Usually, for 28mm models, a period of 24h is enough for the texture to be completely dry, but those cliffs take a lot more of the material, so it won't be all dry in a day. But it's dry enough for us to scrape off the top a bit, so to remove the better part of the debris, to keep it plain so the models can sit firmly on it.

The pic below shows a cliff right after the texture was applied, and we can see the little pieces of thick dust all over the top. You can leave it there if you wish, but it's better to scrape them off, your models will be more stable on there this way.

The drying proccess brings us to the biggest issue with this technique. The texture is humid, and it causes the foam and cardboard to shrink as it dries. This makes the whole piece bend onwards and deform. 

There are some ways to deal with that. One is to put some heavy weight sitting over the borders of the cliff while it dries. A heavy book or two are probably a good option. The weight used over the cliff must be substancial, otherwise it will bend. Nature finds a way, trust me.

In order not to get wet texture on the book, you may put a sheet of paper beneath. As you can imagine, having something in contact with the wet texture is probably going to mess with it a bit, but you can go back to it once its dry and put some more texture over and correct whatever doesn't look good enough. Since it's going to be only a limited spot, it won't cause further bending, so there is no need to worry about weight on it on this second step of texture.

If you don't use weight on the cliff, you'll have to straighten it up later the hard way. The cliff below, for instance, I had to fracture and fill will foam again, to correct it. You can notice that the upper layer of the cardboard detatched from the rest, also. this you can fill with epoxy and then paint over, as I did. It's not advisable to use foam to fill such small gaps, as you're probably going to make a lot of mess.

Once all correcting is done, we're ready to paint the cliffs. I used 2 layers of  grey drybrush on the sides, to represent stoney surface.

Below you can see the result of the drybrush, as well as the split cardboard I mentioned previously. The reason I hadn't fixed it before painting was because I thought I'd manage to simply glue it back to place easily. I was wrong. I had to fill the gap with epoxy and then paint over it and drybrush. To mimic the brown undercoat of the texture,

I used Vallejo MC Leather Brown, and then used the 2 layers of grey drybrush as well. By the way, the Leather Brown is also used before the drybrush on any areas of the cliff where we notice the texture didn't cover well enough. There are a lot os bubbles in the foam, and sometimes the texture doesn't penetrate there, and you only notice it once it dries, so you can fix that by simply painting that spot brown.

The cliff on the left received both the medium and the light grey drybrush, the one on the right had only the first layer, the medium grey, so you can notice the difference, and how the light grey really makes the color pop.

For the top of the hill, I used a single layer of drybrush with light beige, as pictured below. I didn't do this step on the snow hills. These I wanted to keep very dark soil.

On the green hills/cliffs, after the beige drybrush I applied flocking. In the winter cliff, I represented the snow with white drybrush, and then added a few tuffs. The white drybrush must be random, more accumulated on some areas and scarce on others. If you do it too uniform, it won't look natural. Vallejo Model Color Foundation White is the ideal paint to do this step, as it has a very thick consistency.

The flocking on the green hills also has to be applied without uniformity. I do this by drybrushing paper color randomly over the top of the hills and a few areas of the stone borders, and then spilling flocking over it 2 or 3 times, to get a good coverage.

Below, you can see the final results of the cliffs, with an Algoryn trooper for scale.

How I'm going to model my own designs

A few posts ago, a couple readers asked me to post a step-by-step tutorial on how I plan on modelling/scratch building my own designs, and I promised to post about it on the near future. So here it goes.

To begin with, I'll show what I plan on using to model/scratch build, and on a later post, when I actually have a ready model, I'll do a step-by-step on making a mold, which is going to be my first time applying the teachings I recently had on that matter.

First, you'll need a Plasticard sheet, like that on the pic above. 1mm is the best thickness for most designs. It's easy to cut and to glue with superglue.

Although relatively thin, it holds its own well enough,. Trading easiness of cut for additional firmness is a bad deal. You're probably going to be exausted trying to cut the 2mm sheet pretty quick.

I suggest using the 1mm sheet, and then filling it with epoxy here and there to give it better structural integrity.

On the pics above you can see I was performing my first attempt on building one of my designs. It was a Terran Cruiser:

After a while, I realized the proportions were worng, so I put the whole thing aside and decided to start over. Anyway, I wasn't doing it with much care, I was only getting acquainted with the material.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are probably several materials that pass as Plasticard, such as Polistirene and PVC.

I myself am using expanded PVC, as I was adviced not to use the PS, for it is terrible to cut, and is ruined if exposed to direct sunlight for an extended period.

Others things you're going to need are:

Set of Hobby Knifes

Superglue

Pen/pencil and Ruler

And that's pretty much it. I hope to have time to build one of my designs soon, but first I'm going to finish the playtesting stage of Pax Stellarum.

*End of Transmission*

The Carmakian Empire - My first Scratchbuilt Fleet

Here I present you the Carmakian Armada!

The mighty Carmakian Battlecruisers, along with a fighter squadron

The even mightier Carmakian Battleship

Side view

And now, the Legendary Carmakian Mothership: The Invader

side view

The underside detail. Here is where their engines are located, as well as some heavy duty batteries.

The Invader engines. This model came out very heavy (about 1,5-2kg), but the omni-stands are holding it just fine.

You can check the designs here and see if these conversions are decent enough.

And here is how I made them:

The first thing I learned about scrathbuilding is that anything you can use as a basic shape for your model is going to save you the trouble of having to come up with that shape with bare hands. 

So, the Carmakian dome-shaped hull, for instance. Instead of having to mold that free-handed, I could use some support to help me define that shape. Luckly, I found a sconse that provided me with exactly what I needed.

I disassembled the piece, and used the cone end as a support where to shape the battleship's hull with epoxy. 

To make the details, I simply "stamped" some Battlefleet Gothic bits on the epoxy.

I greased the support before applying the epoxy, but it wasn't enough to prevent it from sticking to the metal. Upon taking it out, it came apart, unfortunately. So I figured out I'd need to use a medium to keep the epoxy from sticking to the sconse.

Considering that the battleship's hull is kind of, well... phallic, what a better solution then...

Condoms...

Well, problem duly addressed, and now my hulls came off just fine, so bear with me here...

Anyway, moving on. The battlecruiser needed different solutions:

Basically, a lamp support and this plastic piece which I don't remember right now how to call it.

I positioned the pieces togheter as shown above, and then pressed epoxy into it from the underside, first applying oil on the plastic to prevent the epoxy from sticking there.

 After leaving the epoxy aside for a while to cure, I removed the plastic upperside and stamped the epoxy with BFG bits to apply details.

The underside got a few washers to represent the engines. They were stamped there while the epoxy was still soft.

The Battleships also got those lamp supports to work as the underside part of their hulls, except that for them I needed narrower ones.

For the battlecruiser, I then applied epoxy on the sides of the metal support, and again, stamped it to create the details. But this time I used a Borg Cube as stamp, for it holds a whole lot of detail, perfect for the job.

As for the battleships, I basically glued lots of BFG bits to the low hull, representing its weapons' array.

Now, the Invader needed an even more oddly solution. For the basic shape, I got a pet post.

I cut the post and rearranged the parts so to make its shape less straight, as the Invader tends to have the upper side much broader than the low side.

Next, I covered it with epoxy, and stamped it with a Borg Cube all over, to apply the details.

The fighters ade Agents of Gaming Fleet Action Centauri fighters, which I had bought in excess for my Centauri Fleet. 

And that was pretty much it. Here it is, the finished fleet:

Now, painting it white was a nightmare, mostly considering the spherical tendency of their structure, which makes washing them really tricky, but that is a subject for another day.

*End of Transmission*