I had hoped to have a good bit more terrain ready in time for the Thundertree dragon encounter, but it seems I was overly ambitious on the time frame. One of the in-progress projects that wasn’t done in time was a hill to lay out on my big grass-lined board, for the dragon’s tower and its adjoining building to stand on. It’s finished now, too late for its initial intended use, but I suspect there will be plenty of opportunities to take advantage of it for other outdoor encounters.
It needed to be big enough to hold the aforementioned tower and building along with some small decorative bits, but small enough that there was room on the board for a fair amount of “downhill” terrain features as well. The compromise I made for sizing it was that the sides were less of a gentle slope than I would have liked, to maximize flat surface area without creating much not-very-usable space.
Sculpting the land mass
I started out by sandwiching together a few big pieces of XPS foam using spray adhesive. Then I freehand cut around the edges on the Proxxon. To smooth the edges and hide the layer lines I smeared on a bunch of the lightweight, quick-drying type of spackle. It turns out that this stuff dries fast on the surface, so it can be sanded and painted soon after application, but inside it sets much slower. The problem this causes is that it’s easy to, for instance, poke your finger deep into the seemingly dried surface while picking the piece up.
With spackle re-applied to fill finger holes and allowed to dry longer this time, I mixed a bunch of white glue with water at about a 60/40 ratio and slathered it all over the surface with a big paint brush. I spread sand (from a bag of playground sand I’d picked up at the local hardware megastore) all over the surface and let it dry overnight.
The next day I tapped off the loose sand, and then the whole base was coated with the standard black-and-mod-podge. Once that was dried and I made sure no foam was exposed, I used a flat brown spray paint for the base color.
Next I dry-brushed on a sandy tan color to bring out the texture more, even though most of it would be covered with flocking eventually. I glued on some rocks from the yard and painted them gray, followed by a brown and light gray dry-brushing. Then I slathered on more watered-down glue (being careful to not get it on the rocks) and started the flocking process. This involved first sprinkling some dark green static grass around the rocks, on a few of the slopes, and a little randomly across the whole piece. Then a layer of medium green was spread across the whole surface.
After another overnight drying session and a shaking-off of loose flocking, I put the water/glue solution (and a little extra water) into a small spray bottle and sprayed it all over the whole piece to better lock in the flocking. Once that dried thoroughly, I started adding on a smattering of little dark clump flock pieces, along with some bits of craft-store moss as bushes and some cut-up dollar-store plant pieces.
Once I was satisfied with the plant situation, I gave it a few coats of clear matte spray as an extra protective layer and declared it done.
Starting on scatter
A collection of varied outdoor scatter terrain was on my “to do” list, and I decided to make a few pieces to go along with my hill. I’d also picked up a sheet of a material called EPVC which I wanted to try out for basing, as it’s stronger than cardboard and resistant to warping, but without needing power tools to cut it like MDF does. I cut three pieces of this material with a hobby knife; two of the pieces were curved so that one side could sit flush up against the tower if I wanted it to.
I used some scrap foam to cut little rises to glue onto the bases to add a little variety in the elevation. Onto those I smeared some of the lightweight spackle. I gave it a little time to set and started dipping my fingers into water and smoothing it down.
Since the foam was already covered and the bases were already pretty strong, I skipped the mod-podge step on this one. (Gasp!) Similar to the steps for building my hill, I added sand, paint, rocks, and grass.
I added clumps and foliage to these as well and sprayed them down with a final protective coating when everything was fully dried.
The end result
