The big wooden platforms I built in preparation for The Wild Sheep Chase don’t just sit on the ground – they’re described as rising up above the forest floor on giant trees as high as 40 feet off the ground… so I needed those giant trees.
While I do like the way they turned out, I made them in something of a rush because I expected to have to temporarily curtail my crafting time in the near future. In my hurry, I made some mistakes along the way that I didn’t recognize until I reached a point where fixing them would mean starting over from a number of steps into the process.
Building the bases
I planned to start by cutting out a bunch of circles from XPS foam. My intention was to stack discs from my 3/4″ thick foam sheet onto some pieces of chipboard. Adding in the thickness of the platforms themselves, I calculated the number of slices I would need to make the ultimate height of the top of each platform about equal to what it should be for a 1″ = 5′ scale based on the description in the adventure.
It was at this point that I thought to myself, “I’m bleary-eyed, I’ve been up since 6 AM, it’s almost midnight, and I have to get up at 6 again in the morning, so this would be a good time to go out and fire up the hot wire cutter.”
The end result was the perfect number of stackable circles to build the layout I wanted… if I had cut them from the 3/4″ foam rather than the 1/2″. This was a mistake I didn’t even notice until the pieces were stacked, glued, spackled, mod-podged, and base-coated several days later.
Okay, so… they should be taller. They’re not. Time to move on.
I glued the circles to chipboard and stacked them as appropriate. The tallest one used 4 discs, narrowing in the middle and widening again up top, and I decided to embed some washers in the bottom of that stack as ballast to help keep it upright. This probably wasn’t necessary given the base it was going to be on, but it couldn’t hurt.
Getting to the root of the issue
A while back I’d picked up a couple of little toy foam rockets made of something similar to what cheap pool noodles are made from. The noodles weren’t available at the dollar store at that time of year, but I’d wanted to tinker with that type of foam so I splurged on a $1 two-pack of rubber-band-propelled rockets. I didn’t know if this material would prove useful or not, or even if the hot wire machine would cut it or I’d need to slice it up manually. (For reference, the Proxxon sliced it nicely, right up until it hit the thick embedded rubber band inside.)
I started gluing down strips of sliced-up rocket to add an above-ground root system to the trees. With this basic framework in place I started smearing on some quick-drying spackle. This was messy work and it often stuck better to my fingers than to the surface, but after a few rounds of building it up I got it to roughly the shape I wanted.
I also drew in concentric rings on the stumps’ surfaces just like the ones I did on the platforms. It occurred to me later that I could have done grid lines as well, but on these relatively small surfaces they wouldn’t be terribly useful. I also forgot the “pound it with a grill brush for texture” step, but that wasn’t a big deal.
Leaving it for an hour or so to set so the spackle wouldn’t lift it as easily while working on it, I came back with a jar of water and proceeded to smooth it all out with wet fingers. Using a toothpick, I carved in some vertical lines around the outside of each ring to simulate a bark texture.
I’ve mentioned before that the quick-dry spackle is quick in the sense that it presents a paintable surface in a short time, but it stays soft and wet on the inside for much longer. Knowing this, I set it aside for a day or two. Eventually I’ll invest in some of the quicker drying, non-shrinking modeling compounds favored by terrain builders.
For the mod-podge step I started by coating the undersides, in hopes it would help prevent warping of the bases when I did the tops. I didn’t manage to avoid warping entirely, but the little bit of bend I got was minor. Once both sides were black-and-podged, I was confident that all the foam surfaces were sealed, so I used a flat brown spray paint to give all the pieces a quick base color.
In retrospect I also should have trimmed down the chipboard to the size I wanted before these painting steps, because once I did so I needed to paint the edges again.
I painted the tops with the same suede and brown wash I used for the platforms, and did the same dry-brushing along the bark. (The bark itself took on a sort of waxy look around this point; I’m not sure if it was some reaction of the craft paint with the spray paint, or something related to the humidity of the day… maybe both?) I dribbled a few drops of my Questionable Green Wash into a few crevices to serve as moss or lichen, and added some pebbles here and there which I painted in shades of gray.
“I am Grout!”
I’m still experimenting with different kinds of ground coverings and wanted to try the grout-and-soil mixture I mentioned in part 1. (While I posted about that part of the build first, many of these steps were happening in parallel and this was, in fact, my first use of that technique.) This involved brushing white glue over all the remaining exposed areas and sprinkling the mix across them.
As the photo shows, this resulted in a layer of dust pretty much everywhere. Fortunately after letting the glue dry overnight so the surfaces I wanted covered stayed that way, I was able to clean off all the excess with a soft brush. I was able to do this only because the dusting of grout had stayed perfectly dry on the spots where it didn’t belong.
Finishing touches
Next I wet down some of the dirt surface with a 50/50 water/glue mix and sprinkled on some grass flock.
Then I proceeded to… well, I put them on a shelf and took a break for a couple of weeks. But during that time I researched and ordered some flower and grass tufts, a few of which I proceeded to add in when they arrived. A coat of clear matte finish helped dull some of the shine that remained on some of the pieces, and I declared them finished and moved on.
The main structure for the adventure was finished, but there were still some accessories and outbuildings I needed.