Monday 23 September 2013

Terrain: Cheap and easy hedges

I'm going to be running the Malifaux tournament at Vapnartak this year (the one that I fluked my way to winning last year) and so I'm building terrain.  Lots of terrain...

I'm doing a few different boards, and just a bunch of general terrain that we can spread over other tables.  I need to build stuff relatively quickly and also cheaply.  First up: some hedges.

These are easy.  You will need the following:


-Pan scourers, the flat cheap ones without any foam on them.  99p for 8.
-Something to mount them on.  I used wide (about 1") lolly sticks I got on eBay as they're quick and easy.  Plasitcard, MDF etc will also work.
-Sand and gravel for basing
-Green flock (not static grass)
-PVA glue
-Hot glue gun (optional but makes it easier).
-Spray primer.  I used Army Painter Leather Brown primer for mine.

Method:

-Cut the scourers in half length wise.
-Fold them over so you've got about a 1" high piece of hedge (which will be about 0.5" thick)
-Using the hot glue gun glue the folded halves together.  The glue gun helps a lot here as you get loads of glue for not much money, it holds well and more importantly it dries within a minute or so.  You could also use PVA but you'd need to weight the folded hedge down with some books while it dried.  Superglue would also work I guess.
-Cut the lolly stick to the length you want.  It's basically taking the rounded ends off.  I actually cut mine with scissors.
-Hot glue gun the hedges to the lolly stick.
-PVA glue sand, gravel etc to the base to add texture.  I also found adding some glue and sand to the ends on the hedge helped close up and cover any gaps in the fold.  Let this dry before moving on to the next stage.
-Spray prime the whole lot.  I used brown to prime mine to save me some time.
-Paint the base whatever colour you want.  Mine is just drybrushed with GW Snakebite Leather + Vallejo Light Sand.
-Give the hedge a generous coat of PVA then dip it in the green flock.  Let this dry.  It takes ages so leave it overnight.
-(Optional) Give the flock a coat of thinned PVA just to seal it all on.  You might not need this part really.  The PVA I've got is pretty thin anyway so I just slapped some on neat.

And there we have it:


This is about a 6" section made.  You can just see a Hanged poking his ghostly head over the top to give you an idea of scale.  I'd probably call these Ht2, blocking, soft cover, climbable (so it costs 2" of movement to cross one) when characterising the terrain.



You can see in the above picture I split one and added a little fence to it (made from coffee stirrers).  To make the hedges more ragged on top and attacked them with a pair of scissors.  You could do this with all the hedge sections for a rougher look but I would say if you're going to do that, rather than folding the scourers in half, cut it half and glue the two halves together.  It will be easier to cut the top of them that way.


16 x 6" sections all done.  Total build time for all of it was probably a couple of hours at most.  Per section they probably cost about 10p each and look fairly decent.

1 comment:

Tristan M said...

look fantastic mate!