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Raindog

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Doormat Hayfields by the Terrain Tutor. I find his overly-bubbly personality a bit grating, but he does great work. My misanthropic heart just cannot handle so much cheeriness... 

Dirt roads and tracks. Simple and easy technique, but really effective results... 

Crops and fields.

The nice thing about a lot of this stuff is that it’s almost entirely “scale neutral,” meaning it will work for Bolt Action just as well as Team Yankee/Flames of War if you just leave off things that would give away the scale, like scarecrows or road signs.

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Incidentally, sand bags are super easy to make. Get ahold of some air-dry clay (I recommend Milliput), wet it a wee bit it needed, roll it into flat ribbons about 10 mm wide by about 4 mm thick, slightly oblong in cross section. Snip into lengths about 8 mm.

Then using an old t-shirt (for the texture) pick each bit up and give it ever so slight of a squeeze (imprinting the t-shirt texture and making it look a bit lumpy).

You’ve got a sandbag.

Repeat the process until you run out of Milliput.

You can stack, bend, twist, and pile these little lumps until they dry. Letting you make bunkers, barriers, piles against walls, whatever you need.

Prime black or dark grey, block color with olive drab, apply generous amounts of sepia wash all over. Then apply some black wash as needed.

A 1/2 lbs. block of Milliput should yield far more sandbags than even Rogal Dorn could ever need.

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You can also make effective and attractive hedgerows by:

  1. Gluing a strip of pluck foam down to a wooden tongue depressor 
  2. Covering the new piece in thinned PVA
  3. Placing foliage (Woodland Scenics or whatever cheaper brand you prefer—just looking for the foam-based kind) on the still-wet pluck foam
  4. Use various grit to cover the visible area of the tongue depressor 
  5. Paint the grit like dirt/rocks
  6. Cover the whole thing in a few more coats of thinned PVA to lock it all down

For craters, you can do a similar thing.

  1. Cut out your base out of whatever you want (pressed cardboard should be OK, but MDF/masonite would be best)
  2. Glue pluck foam down in a rough circle a little ways in from the edge of your base (gotta leave room for the taper)
  3. Cover the whole base in a quick spritz of isopropanol (not a necessary step, but a good habit to build)
  4. Cover everything in Sculptamold
  5. Wet your fingers and smooth the edges down around where you placed the pluck foam to create a ridge
  6. Add some larger pieces of grit starting with your small gravel and working down to sand
  7. Give the larger pieces of grit a bit of thin super glue and then hit the whole thing with thinned PVA
  8. After this is dry, hit it with the isopropanol again 
  9. Spray with thinned PVA
  10. Apply dry grout across piece
  11. After that dries, hit it with some more thinned PVA layers to seal it 
  12. Paint

Sculptamold really is a wonderful thing to have if you're into terrain building as it's a fast-drying, plaster-based compound with some paper for volume. Like papier-mâché, but much, MUCH stronger. Dry grout similarly acts as a very fine soil/sand and adds a tough texture that binds the piece together. I recommend pluck foam just because of how ubiquitous it is in gaming circles, but you could also use foam scraps from other projects if you want. 

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On 11/18/2019 at 2:54 PM, Raindog said:

On December 21st, I am running a terrain day to help build terrain for Bolt Action to aid the up coming league.

If you know of or can find tutorials to build hedgerows, craters, tank traps, sand bags, boccage, pill boxes, etc, can you link them to here?

Hirst Arts has some pretty cool looking molds for sand bags and trenches. They also have pretty good ideas for a trench network, even if you aren't using their molds.

https://www.hirstarts.com/tips32/tips32.html#222

It's even got pictures with bolt action minis

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I’m just surprised that Hirst Arts hasn’t leveraged their decades of brand building and good reputation into starting a 3D printer file shop.

Yes, their plaster molds are great, but I think that’s a business model that isn’t going to last much longer. If they took their mold designs and replicated them as downloadable files for 3D printers, I bet they’d clean up.

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On 11/20/2019 at 11:16 PM, Ish said:

I’m just surprised that Hirst Arts hasn’t leveraged their decades of brand building and good reputation into starting a 3D printer file shop.

Yes, their plaster molds are great, but I think that’s a business model that isn’t going to last much longer. If they took their mold designs and replicated them as downloadable files for 3D printers, I bet they’d clean up.

So you're saying I should buy more molds now?

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On 11/20/2019 at 11:16 PM, Ish said:

I’m just surprised that Hirst Arts hasn’t leveraged their decades of brand building and good reputation into starting a 3D printer file shop.

Yes, their plaster molds are great, but I think that’s a business model that isn’t going to last much longer. If they took their mold designs and replicated them as downloadable files for 3D printers, I bet they’d clean up.

Well, that's what I thought about GW, but they seem to be doing fine.

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