I think that this is such a useful technique that it just has to be a top tip!
After some experimenting with glue and card stock, I have developed a method of making curved pieces of card that are stiff as wood.
I needed to make a curved, rectangular radar dish for a WH40K structure (satellite uplink station). The dish measures 3 inches by 1.5 inches with both ends rounded off. Instead of hand-bending the piece to the make the curvature (which would probably crimp and ruin it), I glued three pieces of thin card together, making a sandwich. Then I bent the piece around a support column in my basement and tied a string around it. I let the glue dry for a few hours, and I what I ended up with was a radar dish that was strong like plywood, with just the right amount of curvature! I suppose this technique could be applied to larger pieces as well... Perhaps I'll buy an assortment of PVC pipes with varying diameters for this purpose!
I've a quick terrain tip.
It's polystyrene foam spray. Spray it onto cardboard. shape it roughly as it expands and solidifies and then paint to suit.
You can get it in any DIY shop. It's used for sealing/insulating cracks in walls and stuff
I've seen people mention it on the list and when I had to buy some for home repairs I made sure to get a big tin so I could play with it!
So far I've made 3 pieces: A barricade: cardboard base 9 inches by 5. Spray a line or two of foam down the base and build the ends up with a little extra. Have some strips of cardboard ready. 0.5 inch by about 4. Bend the card so you have 3 sides. As the foam expands push the card into the foam where you want hard points. the foam will expand around the card so be sure to flatten the area behind your barricades a little. I put other things like doors from rhinos , Bendy straws etc. into my barricade. When the foam is finished expanding approx. 3-4 hours you can carve it. I used a craft knife to flatten the area behind the cardboard I'd placed earlier. Lots of people at the convention I went to were asking about this stuff
Hills are easier. Lay down your foam. max. height you seem to get in one shot is 3-4 inches. If you let it dry a bit you should be able to expand on this.
Wow. I have heard of fathers getting a name wrong on a birth certificate, but B@3kEt is the worse example I have come across. Anyway, whoever it is, they love filler:
Any simple wall and ruin can be made really cheaply by simply covering a corrugated card shape with ready mixed wall filler. This is widely used by the GW terrain making team, and I'm surprised it didn't show up here. Filler is the most versatile stuff I've come across (Oh I don't know...money is pretty good too...Gary ;-) mixed with water it makes some ace textured paint, and mixed with sand it makes a rough mixture for building up river banks. Best of all, it's cheap - I made a ton of ruined corners from just 1 tub and there's still a load left.
With Specific emphasis on Necromunda Terrain. (I love post apocalyptic terrain)
- I discovered this by accident one day. Using a 2 part epoxy resin (I bought this stuff at a hobby store, it's called Lumalite, and has the consistency of water, comes in 2 bottles, and you mix a 50/50 solution that hardens into a plastic in 5 minutes, drawback is that it's expensive). I Poured the solution over a section of model that was freshly painted and to my surprise it started to bubble! And as it was bubbling the resin hardened to create the illusion of a frothy bubbling foam, like the surface of some swamp or chemical vat. Why did it bubble? Because as the epoxy hardens, the chemical reaction gives off heat, boiling the water based paint below it. As the steam (water vapor) escapes it leaves air pockets in the solidifying epoxy. I was thoroughly amazed. The epoxy cost me about $40 Canadian, So if it's available in the UK it would probably run you around 20 pounds.
Some less expensive tips...
- Warhammer fantasy skeleton models make excellent corpses to litter the wastes of Necromunda. Hey, look, a retired gang member!
- Stick a plastic skeleton (and a little moss or lichen) inside a plastic tube or bubble, give the bubble a few cracks, and you have yourself the proverbial damaged cryogenic tube with the unlucky occupant/permanent tenant. Don't forget to stick some wires into the tube or glue on some plasticard and paint a computer terminal interface.
- Use flexible drinking straws (the kind that kids use) to make piping for industrial complexes, etc...
- Stick some strands of various colored wire out of the end of one of the straws to simulate a severed pipe
- Certain yarn crafts stores sell a sheet of plastic screen that you can string wool through, these cut easy and make excellent metal grates for floors, etc.
- Cut short (2 mm) lengths of old round plastic sprues to simulate shell casings (I think I saw this in a White Dwarf Once
- Next time you have an old radio, open it up and tear out it's guts, lots of good sci-Fi terrain material inside. (don't try it with a television, unless you have the urge to be electrocuted)
- Tamiya barrels are great, but I also found another product by a similar company. It's a host of pipes for creating a model (for railroad scale) of an oil field. But also Ideal for Necromunda or 40K. And it was not that expensive.
To make bullet holes, hints of erosion, or blast or impact marks on a wall or other terrain feature, here's what to do...
This only works with styrofoam. Take a toothpick (for bullet holes), and dip the end in polystyrene glue, then touch the tip the the styrofoam. It will dissolve quickly. For larger melt-away effects, just glop it on. I found this out accidentally when I tried to assemble two pieces of styrofoam into a single thing, and melted the middle all around the "building". Give it a try!
I went out and bought a can of Krylon Living Color Latex Enamel paint. The stuff doesn't melt the foam in foamboard or styrofoam at all, because it isn't based on toluene or xylene or whatever other nasty benzene-based chemicals you find in other paints... You can skip the time-consuming and annoying step of sealing and just basecoat directly with this stuff. I would highly recommend this product to make basecoating your terrain a bit faster.
When making jungle trees, I use that paper-covered wire you find in craft stores in the plastic flower area. It usually comes in different colors (I use green), it's stiffer than pipe cleaners, and the paper covering makes it look like thick, ropy roots. No paint, no filler, no mess... just twist three strands of it kind of loose, glue it to your base, add any extra branches you want, and add big frilly leaves for a 3-4" tree. You'll want some wire cutters though, it'll munch up your scissors.
First, spackling compound and plaster over styrofoam makes great buildings. I use this for making 1:144 powered warships. I save all the plaster chunks that dry and crack off the inside of whatever bowl I'm mixing the stuff in. The plaster chunks make excellent rubble when pushed into a dollop of spackling compound to hold them in place. By inserting extruded plastic I-beams for model railroads as wrecked steel and giving a black wash to the dried piece, I have created a couple of pretty good rubble piles.
Use CLEAR NAIL POLISH! It even comes with its own brush. Better yet, it doesn't come in outrageously huge quantities, and if you go to the extra-slutty cosmetics section of your local drugstore it's cheap like borscht. A bottle of the cheap stuff went for less than $1.50 Canadian (less than 75p). You can also use it to highlight gems, eyes etc on minis, without having to go to the storage room and pry open the big can.
As an added bonus, they have a range of blues and greens which would make an excellent undercoat. They're sort of semi-metallic; kind of like a silty river delta.
Mind you, I haven't actually put all this stuff into practice yet, but the theory seems sound.