Speed Crafting Tabletop Terrain

All right, today I wanna kick off a bit of a bigger project and experiment with something a little new, as far as video format goes. Basically I wanna try a bit of a mini-series. This is essentially gonna be a test to see how this format might work. This is a plan I’ve had for a while and well, we gotta see how it works. It’s also a cool, incentivized way to help me “get things done”, hobby-wise. And yes I’m a little trepidatious about the whole thing, for two reasons: time frame and labor breakdown.

But, you know, to get somewhere you gotta start walking? Even if you find out later it was in the wrong direction. This is the way.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we plan a mini-series! And we salute our patrons for their patronage, it’s always highly appreciated.

All right, today we’re building a pile of scatter terrain. Is there such a thing as speed-crafting? If so, that’s what I’m after. But first, let me introduce the mini-series thing.

As most of you know, I have a “topic schedule” I try to maintain with videos. That’s it right there. So what I’m envisioning is a 4-episode skirmish related mini-series within the main schedule. This video and the subsequent three skirmish and crafting/painting videos will make up that mini-series, which is all about playing my first solo game – or any game – of Joe McCullough’s The Silver Bayonet. 

I’m gonna start with the first solo scenario in the main book. It’s logical, right? I’m pretty sure Osprey is releasing the first expansion book for The Silver Bayonet right around the time this video drops, and I’ve got that on pre-order, but I won’t have it for this first game series.

This is the scenario and for terrain we just need lots of forest scatter, basically trees and rocks. Not super exciting as far as terrain goes, but you know, having more trees and rocks can’t be a bad thing, right? And to be honest, I don’t have that much general scatter terrain ready to go anyway, most of my stuff is mostly in base material form, meaning, I have a bunch of foam sheets and basing material ready to be made into terrain.

In the next skirmish topic video, we’ll build our warband on paper and select some miniatures, et cetera and then in the following painting video we’ll paint the warband – which I’m not really looking forward to doing, but you know, we’ll face our fears together … or we’ll face my fears together – and then we’ll play the warband in the scenario. 

All right, have I hit the appropriate procrastination meter for everyone? Sweet! Let’s get this show on the road.

First thing we need are bases for the scatter terrain, and of course I cut and shape these outta Sintra. What’s that? Are you actually asking me what my plan is? That’s a bold assumption for you to make. That I would, you know, have a plan. Where do you think you are? Every other professional hobby youtube channel on the internet? Cause you ain’t. You’re here at Tabletop Alchemy, where we’re allergic to plans.

But in lieu of having plans, what I do have are a bunch of sticks and toy trees and tree armatures and basing materials and stacks of foam and some new glues and a desire to work fast and loose. 

So I’m gonna start with making some trees. I’ve had this bag of tree armatures for quite a while and I know they are pretty typical in the hobby space, but I’ve never worked with ‘em before. They have bendable wire buried in the plastic and you just sorta twist and turn and bend them to make tree shapes you like. There are hundreds of videos out there about how to make custom trees from scratch, and while those can certainly turn out to be much better looking in the end, and probably cheaper financially-speaking, I’m balancing my time against my wallet – I got a whole video on that topic right here – but yeah, I just can’t be bothered at this particular moment to craft up a bunch of custom trees. So Woodland Scenics it is. And guess what? I ain’t even gonna paint these trees’ trunks! How dare I?! Remember, this is all about speed crafting!

So in choosing some of the Sintra bases to hold trees and others to hold rocks, I decided that a couple should hold both trees and rocks. Look out, I’m a daredevil! 

All right, I just cut up some foam and stick a few slabs on a few bases and I succeed this time in remembering to create spaces for the miniatures to stand on. I add in some chunks of quarter inch cork board, just, you know, just because. 

These little bits of foam here I’m putting down specifically to plug these pre-fab pine trees into, cause they don’t have their own bases. Little hot glue will hold them just fine. These are actually pretty cool and affordable trees, I got ‘em on Amazon years ago and I had like 5 left to use today. 

Now’s time to make the rock scatter. Using chunks of 1” and 1/2” XPS foam, I just made stacks that are 2 – 3” tall. I thought having a little stonehenge style bridge would be cool, so you know why not? I make sure there’s enough room for a mini to go underneath the big rock and then move on to building up and texturing a few more rock stacks, again always keeping in mind flat areas for miniatures to stand on. I know having some like larger rock formations would be really cool on the table, but I’ll look forward to doing some bigger terrain pieces in the future. For now, I’m keeping in mind the way a lot of skirmish games count half-movement for climbing objects. So typically a figure with six inches of movement can climb 3” in height on their turn. So most of this scatter terrain can be climbable in a single activation. I textured all the foam with chunks of glass rock and didn’t spend too much time, but made sure I covered every exposed surface again as fast as possible.

Now on to the foliage. I really like these fall colors, I picked this set up on a whim one day and finally we get to use it. So this stuff is basically sea foam, which a lot of scale modelers use for trees and shrubs, it’s had colored flock already applied. I think you can just use chunks of this as stand alone trees but it’s pretty spindly and not nearly durable enough for tabletop play. I’m sure it works fine for display purposes but you know we’re making terrain for Dorito-fingered gamers here. So I just break this stuff apart, and pick out usable patches of it and use the tacky glue to hit the armature branches and just stick it on there. And actually when a tree is fully covered in this stuff, it looks pretty convincing. 

Now I have buckets of clump flock in various green colors and I wanted to try to keep costs down on this exercise and use stuff I already have. So I’m using the tacky glue again, I stick some of these small clumps on an armature. I’m not sure why I thought this would be a good idea, because logically doing what I did would create this monstrosity right here. Now, sure, if you wanna play Kill Team on a Dr. Suess table, this is a perfect way to go. But I wanna try again. And I get a bright idea: I’ll mix up some glue and water and modpodge and soak these small clumps and make a little porridge out of ‘em and I bought some wax paper to put spoonfuls of this down on and I’ll just make my own foliage clusters. What could go wrong? 

Well, I’m sure most of you can extrapolate what I ignored. The main thing being the flat bottoms of these cottage cheese clusters. I did kinda think of that and wondered if I could basically sandwich the tree branches between clumps, which would actually work, but the main problem with doing this nonsense here is the stupid drying time. I had to let this stuff sit for basically 24 hours. And then of course I had the flat undersides and the little ribbons of dried glue but those are okay, we can cover those with more flock after they’re on the trees. But yeah, this was a frustrating turn of events. Too long to work with and it just looks like more Dr. Suess terrain. There are definitely applications for this kinda clumping thing but it’s not what I need for the trees.

As luck would have it, while I’m trying to do this little series, I’m also getting slammed with a bunch of day job video production work. When it rains, it pours. In this case, floods. In between droughts. Kinda just like California in general. The life of a freelancer. But, also as luck would have it, a bunch of my gigs occurred about an hour and half drive from where I live and happened to be right down the street from a pretty big hobby store. So after one of my shoots I went shopping. And I picked up a couple more of the sea foam kits in various green colors and I got this, which turns out to be exactly what I didn’t know I was looking for. It’s called foliage clusters and it’s basically a brick of textured flock that hasn’t been pulled apart yet. And I’d never have known to even look for it cause I’ve never heard of it before. 

And yep, for the price vs the work of gluing up dumb custom clusters, this stuff is definitely a winner. You can tease it apart to make large clusters that are still inherently connected, so glueing them to the branches works totally fine. In the end, for me, it was the fastest way to fill out one of these tree armatures. But that said, the sea foam product is much better looking, detail-wise. But for speed crafting and less mess, foliage cluster foam is the way to go. 

But I have these new colors of sea foam so we gotta build trees outta this too. I like mixing the colors up whenever I can, this definitely adds to the overall look of the trees. Now, the last thing I picked up from Pegasus Hobbies was their last bottle of Woodland Scenics Hob E Tac glue. I know that sounds funny, but that’s how it’s spelled. HobETac glue. I’d seen a couple youtube videos on using it and I wanted to try it out out. This bottle cost me eight US dollars. And it’s pretty wonderful. 

The instructions say paint it onto a surface and then wait until it goes clear, which in my environment took about an hour. I think in more humid environments it’s gonna take longer, but even when it’s still white but has had some time to evaporate some of it’s moisture, it’s still very tacky. I was able to just glob on foam flock and sea foam and whatever, it grabbed that stuff super well. It seems pretty durable too, but we’re gonna seal all this stuff later on anyway. 

After messing around with the normal tacky glue and making custom clumps and all that stuff, I wish I’d just had this Hob E Tac from the beginning. I am also fairly certain that this stuff is just some kind of industrial water-based contact cement and there’s probably a much cheaper industrial version of it out there. A quick google search brings up all kinds of products, especially for gluing leather together. So maybe one day I’ll splurge on some of these products and test ‘em out on more trees. I just like how easy it was working with this stuff. 

Some of you are probably shouting at me to use spray adhesive, like spray 77 or something similar. You probably have a valid point. But for me there were two reasons I couldn’t use a spray adhesive. One, I can’t spray stuff like that in my apartment, the fumes are terrible and it gets everywhere. I know from experience. But the other reason is that I would have had to mask off all of the trunks and portions of the branches where I didn’t want flock. So I recommend this Hob E Tac, it isn’t too smelly, it didn’t make me sick to use it in the apartment and when it’s ready to stick stuff too, stuff sticks right to it.

I even just started putting the Hob E Tac onto the already glued flock to add more flock on top and that worked great as well. This is how we learn what we don’t know. We do something new and see what works.

Finally I have all the tree armatures flocked. And now it’s time for a genuine mess. I mixed up my own version of scenic cement for my little cheapy spray bottles with some PVA glue, some modpodge and I meant to add some Mecha Matte Varnish but I forgot and obviously a lot of water. And I doused all the trees in this stuff, just hosed ‘em down as best as I could. Next time I’m gonna use a full size spray bottle with real spraying power. I also put down two pieces of black construction paper to keep the mess contained on the hobby desk. And after spraying down each tree I got out some of this alternative leafy flock I already had from Noch and sprinkled this on top of all the green trees and this was an excellent finishing touch. I mean, you know, most youtube videos about making trees tell you to do something like this and that’s for a reason. But yeah once these things all dried, I think they ended up exactly where I thought I would get ‘em, fairly rugged sealed scatter terrain trees.

For the next step, I decided to order some sculptamold. I’ve never used this brand before but I’ve worked with similar products and it’s just a cheaper bulk alternative to the terrain pastes I have currently on hand. I know you can make your own with toilet paper and plaster of paris and I know you can use like the grout and spackle and sand to do a similar type of thing but you know I was placing an Amazon order for other stuff and just threw this into the shopping cart because I tried to find any store near me where I could just pick it up off the shelf and I couldn’t find a single place with it in stock in a 35 mile radius. Whatever, I got it and we’re putting it down to cover all the seams and where the foam hits the bases and on these small pine trees I just covered their foam bits all the way up. I put some of it on the cork surfaces to add texture and break up any flat areas. This stuff kicks pretty fast but I ended up having to leave it overnight to like finish drying all the way.

When I went to Michael’s looking for sculptamold I decided to refresh my terrain paints and found this line of matte colors from Folk Art and so I got a few of the standard colors I like to have on hand for cheap terrain painting. I put some brown and black into some modpodge and then I forgot to not add water for this step and ended up thinning down the first batch of modpodge which is not what you wanna do for this type of sealing. So I eventually had to drop a second coat of modpodge on top of the first later on. But yeah, sealing all the foam and plaster in modpodge is pretty standard and it goes pretty fast. Then I left that to dry for a few hours.

And now we’re onto dry brushing the rocks. Using my trusty cheap makeup brushes and more of the Folk Art paint, I built up from a pretty heavy first coat of gray to lighter and lighter colors. I introduced some brown just to add some color variation to the stone. I used pure white at the very end to just hit the edges of the rocks, and all this knowing the wash stage is coming next.

I have these two old bottles of Lester Bursley wash that I made like five years ago and haven’t hardly used – because I made it to use on terrain so you can see that obviously I haven’t build a lot of terrain between now and then. But now I finally got terrain to use it on. So I’ve got a black sorta nuln oil clone and an agrax-seraphim sepia facsimile and I also mixed up a bit of this green and brown matte paint and water with a couple drops of 182 proof rubbing alcohol to make quickie Athonian camoushade replacement. It’s not the real way to do this, I should have used inks but this is speed crafting, c’mon! I got no time to do stuff right!

While dumping these washes all over, I tried to mix them up in different spots all over the rocks to create color variation and visual texture. Again, this is the speed crafting method and not a “I’m gonna make the most realistic miniature rock formations in the world and they’re gonna look awesome” method. 

Now finally to flock – we’re in the home stretch! To start with, I mixed up a couple different color tones of flock with all these various flocking products that I have. I put some static grass in the mix and some old tea leaves and I set up a vibrant emerald green mix, and a more realistic dull dark green mix and a brighter, yellowish mix. 

And then, I realize the home stretch is not as home stretchy as I thought. I forgot to do something I should have done before the painting stage. I get some of this Wet Ground terrain paste and add a healthy dose of coarse and smooth sand to it, cause this paste is intended to look like wet mud so it’s only lightly textured and I want something more textured, but I didn’t wanna go buy another jar of the same stuff that just has more sand in it. So I just add my own. It’s kinda like instead of buying 17 shades of gray, you just use bottles of black and white to mix up whatever shade you want when you want. I slap this stuff on small sections of the terrain pieces to create little patches of micro texture and to cover some of the more egregious seams in the foam. You can do this same thing with sand and baking soda and PVA or wood glue, I just went with this kinda expensive jar of terrain product because I know it’ll dry fast. And I’m planning to put flock down wherever I put this stuff down. I don’t know why I’m doing this, it’s actually totally unnecessary, flock would cover everything just fine but it would have been worth the time if I’d done it before the paint went down because then it would have become part of the overall terrain texture and we’d have had this texture to peek through the flock in places randomly. As it is, because I’m putting it down on top of the paint, I kinda have to cover it with flock if I’m not gonna take the time to like paint al the patches individually.

Now, a few days prior I had made a few more of these PVA glue soaked clump foliage bush things on wax paper, but as you can see, my overzealousness with the glue left this border of glue film around the bottom edge of the clusters. But that’s not a problem, we’re gonna blend these edges into the bases with flock and some of that terrain paste. I had these two extra Sintra bases that I had planned to make rough terrain out of, and I figure putting these bushes down will work just fine for that purpose. They’ll offer some, you know, partial cover, a miniature can move across it with the rough terrain penalty, et cetera. Some hot glue to fasten theses bushes down and we’re good to go. Adding one or two to the bases of trees is kinda cool too. Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be speed crafting, not messing around with actually thinking about extra details, let’s get a move on!

So these two bases of shrubbery get fully covered in the terrain paste and we’ll add a little dry brushing after it dries and some random flock with the time comes. 

Which is now, the Abby Singer step! The Abby Singer is the second to last shot of a shooting day on a film set. The last shot is called the martini shot. Which I’m sure you can infer why. Anyway, time for flocking these stupid things that I’m very sick of looking at. I add a little bit of black and umber ink to the PVA glue and a splash of water, but that’s kinda unnecessary too. This flocking process took a decent amount of time, relatively speaking. But it’s the step that makes the whole process look like something, finally, that I might be okay with having on the table. Having grown up in the desert, I have a strange yearning and love for all things forest-y and mossy. And rocks covered in greenery, however fake they may be, just makes me feel good to look at. I just really enjoy flocking greenery over chunks of stone, it just looks … pretty to me. 

And now the martini shot! I got a big boy spray bottle this time and put my pre-mixed scenic cement in there and it was truly overkill. I hosed these things down like I had cement to spare. Which I did not, but man, using this spray bottle versus the little perfume sprayer thing, it was a bit much. I easily wasted 50% of the cement on the background paper I put down to protect my tabletop, which I basically soaked through in about 2 seconds. There’s something to be said about having a garage or a basement or some kind of workshop area that isn’t your apartment for this kind of mess. Someday, right? Gotta have dreams.

So in the end, I recorded about five and half hours of footage. And I was being pretty conservative with hitting that record button, having learned my lesson from previous videos. So my guess is I probably put about 15 hours into this batch of scenery. And yet I was going at it with a speed crafting mindset. I didn’t do anything spectacular with the carving of the rocks or really anything too creative. I was honestly just trying to go fast and ride that line of acceptability. But the trees took me a long time to do and yeah I think it’s just manual labor, just all the grunt work, the grind so to speak. 

And I had to fight Rowan Witchbane every step of the way to keep my terrain from being ripped apart by her gleeful claws and mischievous mischief making. She’s a tiny Tasmanian Devil. To all things hobby-related. 

Next time around I think I can do the trees much faster because I’ve worked out all the kinks, I know more about what I’m doing. In fact, I bought another bag of tree armatures when I was at Brookhurst Hobbies the other day, just because I have all that sea foam left and a couple of colors of that foliage cluster product and the most important thing, to me, that bottle of Hob E Tac. So making more trees in the future won’t be such a pain the ass. Carving up stone from foam, well, that’s always just gonna be tedious. But next time I do a batch of terrain, I want to take the stone formations a little more serious and put some thought into the design and making some cooler more natural-looking shapes and textures. 

But hey, that’s a batch of rocks and trees done! I’m so glad this is over. Admittedly, this whole process happening to occur with that sudden influx of day job work really cramped my schedule, so it was, you know, kinda tough to get through. And now that I’m looking at all of it together, it’s kinda weird … it kinda doesn’t look like enough terrain. Well, it’s gonna have to be enough to play that Silver Bayonet scenario. 

So, go speed craft a table full of scatter terrain, and enjoy that martini shot when you get to the end.

See ya!