In my previous post about cavern tiles and scatter terrain, I expressed that a) I had mixed feelings about how they turned out, and b) I wasn’t quite done with them yet. It turns out that adding a few little extra bits addressed a lot of my misgivings about the questionable lichen-y parts of my pieces.
A while back I found a video about making mushrooms by dribbling blobs of hot glue onto a sheet of tin foil. I can’t seem to find that video at the moment, but it was more or less the same one as shown in this video (except this one uses parchment paper).
My glue-blob sheet was a stringy mess and peeling the mushroom heads off if without leaving sharp bits of foil sticking out from the undersides was a pain, but I eventually got them all separated and sufficiently cleaned up. There were a few flatter mushroom slices that I intended to be side-mounted, but the rest had toothpicks driven into them to serve as stalks.
I’d also made a big blob to test paint colors on. In specific, I wanted to play around with some “glow” paint (in a bright green and a “neutral”, which turned out to dry clear) to see what kind of effect I could get. The top half of my blob was painted with some pure colors, the bottom with the same colors mixed with the neutral glow paint. One one end was the neutral paint itself; on the other, the glowy green.
As it turned out, even after an hour or so on a sunny windowsill, only the pure glow paints had any glow at all, and those only just a little bit. I next tried coating the whole test strip with a layer of neutral, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. I did end up using some the glow green on a few mushrooms, and eventually coated all of the others with the neutral just on the off chance it might provide some small amount of phosphorescence.
I painted the stalks and undersides in the same “suede” colored craft paint I used on my cave tiles and scatter terrain. I put a little of the remaining cave tile wash on the stalks as well, but this time it darkened them more than I’d expected – probably because of the porosity of the wood. Not a big deal, though, since the stalks wouldn’t be too visible in the shade of their caps anyway.
I coated the tops of the mushrooms in various colors, and used a paint-dipped toothpick to dab little dots onto most of them. Soon I had a few small piles of mushrooms grouped by color – along with a few flatter, less-colorful, stalk-less ones.
When the time came to start attaching them to my terrain, I started with the flat ones. For the few pieces where I was going to use them, it was enough to trim a shroom edge to match the shape of the surface it was mating to, lay the terrain piece on its side, and use some tacky glue to stick on the mushroom jutting upward. After some drying time, laying the terrain back down resulted in clumps of protruding fungus.
But the colored mushrooms were the real highlights. I clipped their stalks to random lengths and started distributing them around the scatter pieces. Mushroom installation was as simple: I used a toothpick to poke a pilot hole where I wanted to place a bit of fungus. I selected a shroom, dipped the end of the its stalk in a little white glue, and slid it into the hole.
I was rather pleased when all was said and done – the mushrooms added splashes of color and detail that were not only interesting on their own, but drew attention away from the questionable green slime wash!
So this week or next, when we start into the last leg of the Starter Set adventure, we’ll be doing it in rooms that look something like this:
