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!

Got my Last Of Us shirt on.

Today, I’m gonna share with you one of the super secret, little known, tried-and-true methods of measuring the visual quality of miniatures or models destined for the big screen. Circa 1995 and earlier … you know, prior to HD, 4k, 8k, digital cameras and projection, et cetera. So it might be a little outdated.

And due to being outdated, this little tidbit of wisdom from the golden age of practical Hollywood special effects miniatures is one that you can’t really use any more for one aspect of our hobby but you can for another. Sounds confusing, I know, but I swear it’ll make make sense in a bit. 

One thing you always did when working on a model for a big budget movie or tv commercial was establish which side of the model was the “hero” side. Meaning the side of the model that was going to be seen by camera. Because, kinda just like in video games today, if you ain’t seeing it, there ain’t no point in building it. Save them ducats everywhere you can.

Of course, we build models for tabletop gaming, which means … every side is the damn hero side.

Greetings good humans and welcome to TableTop Alchemy, where once in a while your host delivers some actual – if entirely outdated – insider information. At least anecdotes. And we tip our hats to our patrons for doing that patron thing – as always, much appreciated.

All right, today we’re gonna paint up our first MDF kit. Meaning, I’m gonna paint up my first MDF kit – well, I guess if I’m honest, it’s really half of a kit, since there are two houses included in this one set from TT Combat – but I’m really gonna paint it all the way up to finished, not my typical “oh I’m doing some experiments so I don’t have to actually finish a model” sorta thing – not Pachow – and we’ll dutifully note the thought processes and mistakes as per usual. 

And there are definitely mistakes coming up. But they’ll also illustrate one of the cool things about this hobby – mishaps or errors are actually all very low stakes because of the intended use cases for these miniatures. In other words, there’s not much you can do wrong that would preclude you from actually using a miniature or piece of terrain on the table, no matter what it’s final look looks like. I mean, you can play games with completely unpainted terrain and minis. Gasp. Dare to be different! 

Anyway, to kick off my first foray into the Pile of Opportunity: Terrain Edition, I selected one of the smallest kits I have. And as I’ve mentioned before, all my MDF kits are already built – and usable – so this is not a “how to build an MDF kit” or MDF kit review type of video, it’s just about painting up one of these little guys.

So I’ve got two copies of this Briar Rose Cottage set, and we’re gonna work on the smaller house from one of them today. I wanna start small, see what working with these things is like. Cause I gotta bunch to paint up. Seriously. A bunch. 

As a lot of you know I play a little bit of Minecraft and over the last year or so I’ve been enjoying, in that game, the “cottagecore” aesthetic and I feel like these Briar Rose Cottage models kinda fit right in there. I mean, it’s kinda in the name right? Cottagecore basically boils down to “I just wanna put a bunch of flowers and plants around a cute little house.” 

I think for a future video it would be fun to take the second copy of this little house and do it up as a “ruined” or “abandoned” cottage. Yeah, I’m definitely putting that in the list of terrain video ideas. But you know, there’s plenty of time to ruin today’s model too, so, let’s see how it goes.

Now, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about sharing that little tidbit of Hollywood special effects wisdom, but it’ll arrive at the appropriate time. 

So first thing is coming up with a color scheme. When I was trying to come up with a color scheme for the little house on the tabletop I had an odd thought. Well, it’s everywhere so it’s not surprising I had the thought, it’s surprising how long it took me to think of it. Me and my old brain, getting smoother by the day.

Let’s pop over to our friendly neighborhood job-killer: Midjourney AI. I pay the lowest monthly tier subscription to be able to use this whenever I want, but I’m pretty sure you can try it out for free if you’re curious about it. I’m sure a lot of you out there are already familiar with these art AIs, and I’m sure there’s more than a few of you that might be a little uncomfortable regarding my use of such a controversial tool. AI stuff in general is definitely worthy of a huge amount of discussion and debate and maybe one day we’ll chat about some of it together but for today (maybe in one other coming soon video, wink wink nudge nudge – I don’t know what that weird wink was. Do you, do you wink when you say wink wink? I don’t think so). Anyway, we’re just gonna use it for fun today. Typically, I use Midjourney to create b-roll images for my edits in these videos, but I thought it might be interesting to see what it generated as far as color schemes for today’s project.

First I uploaded this phone pic of the actual miniature as a reference for Midjourney, and then punched in “forest cottage with blue roof” as the first prompt. Because for whatever reason I was pretty sure I wanted to paint the roof of the model blue. There’s just something very cottagecorey about blue roofs, for me. Also Greek but in this case, a blue roof would hopefully add a little bit of cute fantasy flair to the piece. 

So here’s the first result and it’s not bad. Using a reference image is a pretty neat trick with Midjourney. Right away it’s kinda giving me a pretty decent color scheme. I went ahead and tried a few different prompts, here’s what I got with little tweaks to the prompt. I removed “blue roof” just to see what it would create and I actually really like this overgrown look, that’s also a very “cottagecore” sorta thing. But that’s also a lot of basing materials, so maybe one day, when the budget for this channel gets, you know, up here somewhere, we can start spamming expensive miniature plants.

So then I had a stroke of genius and added “tabletop terrain” to the prompt, just to see what it would do. Check out how it puts the houses on bases. I tried adding “stone cottage” to the prompt and this time Midjourney actually put the houses on tables even. Again, I found this pretty interesting. 

So, after checking these all out, I decided to go with a blonde stoned color for the – blonde stoned color? Oh boy. So, after checking these all out, I decided to go with a blonde stone color for the bricks and a reddish brown for the wool accents – wool accents? 

Before I could start painting the model I had to think a little bit about the base. And this is a pretty big question for me concerning all the MDF kits I have – whether to add a larger base to them or not. There are definitely good reasons NOT to add a base, such as adding a base increases the footprint of the model on the table and even for storage this could be an issue. Adding a base also increases the height of the model a little bit and to be perfectly honest, there’s just not really any reason TO add a base. 

Except one: flowers. I really wanted to decorate the outside of the cottage and I felt like I needed an outer area to put the decorative terrain stuff on, you know, the tufts and stuff. Now most of the MDF kits I own don’t have actual bases incorporated into them like this particular house does. I’m pretty sure this one has a base plate because of this little exterior workshop area. 

So next I was concerned with how just sticking this onto another larger baseplate was going to introduce this lip all the way around the house I’d have to deal with. As luck would have it, this model’s base is almost exactly 3 millimeters tall and matches really well with 3 millimeter Sintra. Sometimes luck does happen in our favor, we just don’t pay attention to it as much as when it doesn’t happen in our favor.

But then another thing I got stuck wrestling with was how to actually attach what essentially would be an “outer rim” to the model’s base, and I was worried about structural integrity. I briefly thought about cutting like 1” wide strips and building them up around the model but then there would just be all these connection points that would somehow have to be glued together and I ended up just tracing the outline of the model on a larger piece of Sintra and cutting it out. I tried to err on the smaller side of the outline but as you see there’s definitely a couple sides where there’s a big gap. But on the other sides the fit was very snug and I’m just going to rely on superglue and baking soda to hold the whole thing in place. Again, this is a pretty risky venture and having completed the model at this point, I would definitely say this isn’t the best way to do this. The whole cutting out the middle is a decent choice but what I would do next time in addition to this is get ahold of some very thin styrene or probably even just card would have worked, just something very thin and flat that I could super glue across the gaps on the top surface to reinforce the connection between the Sintra and the MDF. 

As you’ll see later, I go over the entire outer base with some terrain texture paste and that would easily have covered up any thin pieces of card or plastic. 

Now when I started going ham on the beveled Sintra edges, I made one massive mistake, and that’s purely from rushing the process. There you go, I just chopped a huge chunk of my border off because I was impatient. This is unsurprising, because it’s me. Hey, I’m a work in progress. For two seconds I thought about trying to repair that and three seconds later, I was like, nope, this is just how it is now. And this is what I mean about doing stuff for tabletop gaming, these pieces aren’t necessarily made for display and this is gonna be just fine during a game.

Another mistake I made is I forgot the whole “don’t forget to make your surfaces miniature-base friendly”. Usually this means putting a mini down to make sure the surfaces are wide enough and level enough to have a miniature stand on it. I should have cut my outer edge at least another 1/2 inch wide on at least three of the sides. Ah well, see the work in progress statement from, you know, like twenty seconds ago. 

Using both thick and medium viscosity superglue I attached the MDF to the Sintra and made sure I didn’t let any super glue leak through the bottom and attach itself to like the work surface or the scraps laying around. It seemed to work, and there it is, nice and flat. I’m actually pretty surprised.

So I put some Stynelrez gray primer down, kept the removable roof … removable, and yeah, once everything had a uniform gray coat, it’s time for paint. In case you’re looking for the best way to prime MDF terrain, specifically in cases where you can’t use a rattle can, I’ve got this video right here where you can check out some tests I do with various techniques and materials.

All right, I was pretty excited by this whole blue roof idea so that’s what I started with. I went with a pretty dark blue and actually took the time to paint individual tiles leaving the dark primer in between for some contrast. Now this is gonna end up being a sort of running motif through this entire exercise – me doing stuff in the long run that is just kinda unnecessary. Halfway through the roof painting I knew I should have just airbrushed a base coat of blue on the roof, and saved a lot of time. The results of my painstaking approach is essentially unnoticeable and therefore irrelevant.

After the base coat I drybrushed a brighter, more saturated blue across everything and then stepped up to a significantly lighter blue with the idea that I’d probably wash down the effect with … a wash. But I actually never did go back with a wash for that part, I ended up liking the sort of higher contrast weathered look from that really light blue dry brush. 

I went with a reddish brown for the timber details and blocked all those out in one pass. 

I blocked in the upper walls and the chimney with the “blonde stone” color I had in mind, which I mixed up from a light gray and a light sand color, and I planned to douse these surfaces in washes as well. 

I figured for the chimney bricks and the bricks that are in the lower walls, I could pick out some of them in different colors, so I even threw some pink in the mix and some oranges and grays, just to break up that overall flat blonde base color. 

I did some rough highlighting and edge highlighting with successively brighter browns on the wood bits. I definitely planned to put a wash over the wood bits as well so I tried to go brighter than necessary. The wood grain in a few of the detail pieces is pronounced in a stylized way, so I decided to go with a fairly cartoony approach to that wood grain, again, knowing the wash was gonna knock it all back down.

Then I slapped all those various washes down over all the various parts. I used similar wash colors but I used different brands and different hues to keep some subtle variation across the whole model so the different surfaces didn’t end up being too uniform. 

Now the upper wall portions I felt went too dark, and a little too saturated with the wash colors, and I happened to see little piece of foam flock on the desk and I thought, hey, let’s use that to do a cool sponge dabbing texturizing thing! 

I ended up really liking this sponged-on lighter paint look, I feel like it definitely created a sort of stucco or weathered plaster sort of look, and the contrast it created with the brighter portions in the middle I thought looked pretty good. After touching up spots where the sponge went outside the lines, I drybrushed some very flat black onto the chimney to simulate soot and then we’re onto the lower building.

I laid down a couple thin coats of the pale sand color mix for the brick walls, popped in some multi-color bricks to match what I did on the chimney, and then proceeded to screw the whole thing up with a wash that went on too heavy. These walls ended up going way darker than I wanted them too, I should have wiped off a lot of that wash from the middle flat areas. But I didn’t and as per usual, I just kept on trucking, things are gonna be what they’re gonna be. To brighten things up a bit and to add some texture to the walls, I went in with the sponge again and it worked okay. I like how this looks on the roof’s blank walls versus how it looks here on the brick pattern walls, but it definitely adds something to that crappy dark wash result. But then I couldn’t leave well enough alone and I had to go and mess it up again, with just another too dark wash. 

Yep, I’m the best at what I do, I defy you to find someone better. At making mistakes. I mean performing artistic experiments!

I base coated all the wood trim with the same color used on the roof and I did this little exterior patio thing in a different sorta more grayish brown just to get away from that uniformity again. I used Citadel Targor Rageshade, which is a bit on the purple side, to douse the canvas roof thing, again, just for some variation in color. 

Then I went through and added those sorta cartoony striations to the laser-cut wood grain and this took a pretty long time. And it’s also probably not something I would do again, I mean, not for a tabletop gaming piece. 

I did some drybrushing on the patio thing and then dropped a wash on the wood details. After that wash dried I felt like the wood was just really flat still, so I said screw it and did some drybrushing on the timbers too. And I think it actually worked. On the next models I’ll probably just go with a few layers of drybrushing rather than painting in those initial striations in the wood grain.

And of course the door is blue to match the roof. I know in feng shui the door should be red, but whoever lives here has not heard of feng shui, they just like the color blue. Like me. I used a darker, less saturated blue because, again, I just didn’t want to use the same exact color from another spot on the model. I just wanted to be similar. I literally drew in some wood grain on the door with a light blue and then washed it all down with Citadel Nightshade, specifically the old formula wash because I don’t have the new formula wash in that color.

Yet. I’ll get it, don’t you worry. 

Then I used cheapy craft paint to base the base in a brownish green. I kinda always do this even if I’m going to put other stuff on the top of it, I just want to make sure if there’s any spots I miss later on, they won’t show up as weird gray or white spots. 

Then I covered all the weird glue seams and most of the outer base with some AK Interactive Muddy Ground texture, “man it really tied the room together.”

Then it was finally time for the plants and foliage decor, the whole reason I wanted to do this little cottage to begin with. I used some standard chunky flock for this one bush and then went to town with the flowers and tufts and vines and shrubbery. Some of the products I’m using here are from Huge Minis, Mini Natur, Army Painter and AK Interactive – I’ll drop some links below for ya. I used this sort of autumn colored ivy product for the weird patio area, thinking maybe this is where a lot of work was done or maybe some smithing or something with smoke and open flames and so the plants in that area weren’t as bright as elsewhere. Or, you know, I did it just because it added more color variation. 

Then I flocked the entire base with a couple different leafy flocks and tucked it all up around the flowers and I used a little sand and some darker flock to kind of denote areas that had heavy foot traffic, like the front door and the patio workshop area. 

Then, taking some inspiration from both those Midjourney cottage images and my Minecraft cottagecore builds, I started adding some moss and ivy to the roof. I actually really like how that stuff looks agains the blue tiles and brown timbers, very contrasty and I don’t know, just kind a cool.

Then to wrap it all up I sprayed the whole house with Mecha Matte Varnish to seal it all up and unify all the different surface textures, like areas of exposed glue and some shiny areas left by certain washes, et cetera.

And here’s the finished piece. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it as far finishing a piece goes, but I do think that the walls got too dark and I should have probably repainted them. But you know me, I’ll apply whatever lessons I’ve learned here, in theory, to whatever the next model is I work on. 

But wait, what about that bit of Hollywood special effects wisdom? Well, this is where that comes into play. When we were asking ourselves if a model was complete enough or detailed enough to take the filming stage, we would perform one simple test, and you can do this yourself. Stand one one foot, tilt your head, close one eye and hop and down. Does the model look okay? If so, walk away, it’s done.

No, of course you think that’s a joke. And it was admittedly 50% facetious. But was also, and I’m not joking, 50% a legitimate test of what a model would probably look like on the big screen. Film grain, camera movement, motion blur, and dramatic lighting all tend to work together to sort of mash up fine details of a model in a movie. And I would bet cold hard ducats that if most of you were to see in-person actual Hollywood miniatures you would probably be surprised at the general lower level of detail or finish on a lot of them. They’re just not made for up-close scrutiny. Now granted, there were a few models that were very highly detailed and very nicely finished, but overall, tabletop quality is a lot closer to the level we were building too. 

And I feel that silly little quality measurement saying – hopping on one foot with one eye closed – is a good gauge for what can pass on the tabletop. So feel free to use it for that purpose. Of course, that goofy test is of no value whatsoever if you’re talking about putting photographs of your models online for display. We just live in a different world where movies can be freeze framed and scrutinized and that sort of thing just requires higher levels of attention to detail. But for games on a table, anything goes!  

So. Work to the level you like working to, to play your games. And always have fun.

See ya!

Let’s see, I can pick up some XPS foam, get some ModPodge, cut it up with a craft knife, roll in some rock texture with balled up aluminum foil, maybe cut out a base of MDF or foam core, I can glue up some walls, maybe carve in some detail. Better get some balsa wood, I can make wood strips outta that, and even scribe in some extra wood grain detail. Okay, gotta make a roof, so maybe I’ll cut up some cereal boxes and use some scissors to trim out a row of shingle looking things. I can glue those to more foam core and that’ll make a good roof, and – oh, I forgot the windows. Right, okay, cut some windows into those foam core walls, and yeah I need a door. Okay I’ll cut that out of some foam core, strip off the outer layer of paper, scribe in some wood panelling and then I guess cut it into an arch? Yeah, then I gotta make an arch out of little bricks I can cut from the scrap XPS and glue those around the doorway … Or! I could just buy this.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we ponder useless things and argue about first world problems. 

Like making or buying tabletop terrain.

There’s no TLDR for this one – and even if there was, you know it’d be at the end of the video anyway, so why are you even asking?

I think most of us have the same reaction to the question of “should I buy this particular thing or just make it myself?” That reaction being “Making it will be cheaper!”  And sometimes, that’s true. Sometimes, it’s not, and sometimes it feels like it’s true when it actually isn’t. Confused? Good. Now I don’t feel so alone.

All us humans, I think we typically want two things: money and happiness. Whether those are misguided is a topic for another video. But I think the most valuable commodity in our human existence is time. We basically buy and sell time, trade it – all the time – without even realizing it. Or maybe just without acknowledging it. But we also sort of inherently equate Time with Free. And that’s a huge mistake. Like it’s super easy for us to just not consider what our time is worth because we labor under the delusion that we have an infinite amount of it. And I assure you, dear viewer, it’s the only thing we absolutely do not have an infinite amount of. And when I say the phrase, “what our time is worth”, the word worth, the word worth — the Rural Juror – when I say the word “Worth” I’m not limiting the meaning of the word worth to simply money. There are other things of value, some might say way more value, than ducats in the bank.

So, how often do you consciously include time in your decision-making process when considering how much something is worth? And the “something” doesn’t have be a consumable product, it could be an activity or time with another person, it could be a lot of things.

Now, I know there are a lotta people who do have a personality or cognitive process that allows them to really consider time when they are making decisions. I am not one of them. My friend Dan Adam of Paint All The Minis IS one of them. I literally marvel at his thought process sometimes when he explains to me how he thinks about or considers his hobby activities and purchases. And while I will never be able to think about things in the same way as he does, there’s definitely a few things I can learn from his perspective on things.

So let’s try to set up a few specific examples for today’s topic and see where they take us. First off, we need to set some parameters. I’m gonna say that there are three categories of purchasable terrain: Pre-painted and assembled; unpainted and unassembled; and 3d printable. Now there are folks who have 3d printers at home and folks who do not, like me – and yes, it is in fact all about me – so those of us who do not have printers might buy printed terrain from places like Etsy or whatever. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m gonna disregard pre-painted terrain and assume that painting will have to be done for all of our comparison subjects today.

So for test case number one, let’s use a medieval townhouse sorta thing. Here are three similar examples, one from the Ferrari of tabletop terrain, Dwarven Forge, another from TTCombat, a laser-cut MDF kit, and this last is a random item from a random Etsy seller. Note that this particular item is printed on an SLA printer, filament printer, so it’s not resin and therefore it’s much cheaper than a good resin print but also has those lithography print lines that I personally kinda hate. 

Now the Dwarven Forge item is a set of three smaller houses, but they are also custom-buildable out of all these magnetic pieces, so you can make one larger structure out of it. I think it’s close enough to the other two insofar as the amount of detail or usable space on the table to be a good comparison. I have the TTCombat model and I already built it, it took a couple hours and some wood glue, pretty straightforward but still, it does require assembly. The printed model has the most detailed interiors by far, so that’s a plus for that one. But we can already see a range of trade-offs versus cost. The TTCombat MDF model is probably the least detailed of all three but that laser etched surface does have fine detail that does show up under primer and paint. 

I got a video on that right here. And yes, I almost did it, I almost said pa-chow.

The printed model has better detail than the Dwarven Forge set and even though it’s got that annoying print texture, to be honest, painted up and on the table, it’s probably fine. I’m just weird and ornery about micro details that don’t really matter. So $136 bucks for the Dwarven Forge set, main advantage being you can rebuild the set in a number of ways. $50 for a printed building with max detail. Or around $20 for the MDF kit. We’re ignoring the shipping parameter ‘cause … well, I’m pseudo-scientific at best. Personally, I like the MDF kit and the printed one over the Dwarven Forge set – kinda for aesthetics but really for the price versus what you get. I think the printed one is my favorite, but the price tag of both it and the Dwarven Forge set definitely make me consider building my own. Whereas the TTCombat set, to me, is just a no-brainer.  

So let’s think about that for a minute. To build something similar to these ourselves, we’re gonna need some XPS foam – very doable, but still an associated cost. Now you can get a 4×8 sheet of 1/2” XPS, which is probably what I’d use for a building like this, for around $30. We’d only be using maybe a quarter of it for this build – yes, maybe less, but I’m the builder in this example and I’m 100% guaranteed to make many mistakes by measuring once and cutting 50 times, so whatever, just go make your mistake-free builds over there and leave me to my misery. So we’ll use say $8 worth of XPS foam. 

Now someone’s gonna shout out, “Just use foam core from the dollar store, you numbskull!” And your observation is valid. I am indeed known at times to be numb of skull, but I also, personally, hate building with foam core. It’s just, I don’t know, to me it just reeks of disposability. Stuff built out of foam core feels weightless and impermanent. Maybe because in a lot of industries foam core is what you use for mockups, not finished models. That’s why I like Sintra and plastic and even the XPS foam, which due to it’s density over foam core, feels a lot more permanent. I just want a like a certain feel from my models but yes, dollar store foam core would be much cheaper and is a completely viable alternative.

So we’ve got $8 of XPS. We’ll need something to make like the rock or brick base for the building, I think I’d scribe that into panels of Sintra but thin sheets of XPS could work. Balsa strips or strips of scribed Sintra could work for the exposed lumber beam details and more scribed XPS would work for the lower floor of the building. We gotta design the upper floor and engineer how both the upper floor and the roof are going to sit on the lower floor and be easily removable. That all probably involves some more strips of whatever main material we’re using and a whole bunch of time measuring and fitting and generally doing design and build work. The roof I would base out of large pieces of Sintra, but of course YOU can cut it outta card or foam core or whatever nonsense you wanna use. 

You guys know I’m just kidding with the sarcastic bits here – I do truly dislike using foam core myself but I know that’s literally my own issue in my own head, there’s nothing wrong and probably lots of things right with using foam core and it’s definitely versatile and cheap.

Now the shingles for the roof could either be painted on – lame – or cut out of stacked strips of card, which in this case, I think that’s a good use for card, or, if you wanted to be a little bit insane, you could hand-cut 500 shingles out of styrene and … no, no one’s gonna do that. But still, even just using card to trim out the shingle details, that’s a good chunk of time and some fiddly model-making work. Then of course you got some glue cost, that’s no big deal unless you’re using CA glue, but it’s still negligible. And then there’s probably going to be a ModPodge undercoat to seal the XPS foam et cetera. So I’m just throwing a number out there, maybe all told, we’re gonna spend around $15 on this model counting every bit of material used. Maybe it’s less, maybe it’s like $10 worth of materials. 

So right off the bat, even if we’re really conservative on the materials cost estimate, we’re already at least in the ballpark of that MDF kit price. And now we need to factor in TIME. Now, plenty of you out there might be able to knock this build out in a day. I would say if you’re an experienced model builder, and I mean in this hobby type of model building, and especially if you’ve built something like this before, my guess is you could build a structure similar to our three examples in, I don’t know, couple of hours? Just a guess, and I’m assuming a certain quality level here too. If you’re a solid scratch builder and you’ve never built a house like this before, my guess is this is probably a full 8 hour day of work. This might be the category I fall into, but I haven’t scratch built stuff in a long time. Now of course, as hobbyists, we would probably work on it an hour or two a day until it was done. But let’s say it takes a day to build a model similar to our purchasable examples both in detail quality, an interior, removable floors and roof. So how much is a day of work worth to you?

For some of us, the cost savings versus the day of work is a totally viable option. Some of us might think burning a day of work in lieu of spending $50 is nuts. Some of us might just wanna build our own model just because we wanna build our own model. For me, in my current financial situation, I would not by the Dwarven Forge set, but I would definitely consider the $50 printed model. And of course I already bought the MDF kit. The MDF kits, especially from TTCombat due to their pricing, really are almost no-brainer must-haves, in my opinion. They’re just too cost effective, even when comparing their seemingly lack of detail against more detailed but more expensive models. And you can always add some detail to the MDF structures! And to be even more honest, I think TTCombat has like some super competitive pricing compared to other MDF kit makers. I’m not putting down other MDF kit makers, there’s a bunch of awesome stuff out there that is super cool and a lotta designs that are not manufactured by TTCombat. 

But a day of work vs a day of free time to do other things you might want to or have to do, that is the question. And $20 or $50, for me, is kinda hard to trade off for 8 hours of my time. 

All right, let’s consider another test case: ruins.  A lotta times the same ruins can be used for both sci-fi and fantasy games, so right there, we have some added value. Here’s where I kinda default to “I’ll just build ruins myself” because I never think about them needing too much detail. But that said, there are some pretty cool purchasable ruins out there. Sets like these printed ruins – and these are PLA resin, not filament, so even better – the detail in these, and these from Dwarven Forge – I keep bringing up Dwarven Forge I’m just trying to have a set comparison, a set of, a comparison set that we return to. Anyway, these ruins are not something I could recreate easily at the home hobby desk. In fact, I would almost argue that these types of ruins, with all this sculpted detail, are maybe worth more of our hard-earned ducats than those buildings we just talked about. I mean, a building is something I can get my head around and actually believe I can make on my own, but the architectural details in these sets, there’s no way I’d be able to craft those on my own versus buying them. 

Now these kinds of ruins, this sorta rough hewn columns and rocky terrain type stuff, these are the kinds of things I think make home crafting a vastly better choice. Using just trimmings from other projects, you can knock out scatter terrain ruin pieces like this in like twenty minutes. Not counting painting. You can make walls outta XPS, columns outta cardboard tubes with filler slapped over ‘em, or odd pieces you find laying around, they don’t have to be pretty, they’re so fast and pretty easy to make they’re just pretty much disposable. 

All right, last test case – let’s use something big, something highly detailed and maybe a bit too stacked for this conversation but, you know, let’s roll with it. How about a medieval pirate ship? Now there are MDF ship models, and to be honest, they are probably the most game-friendly insofar as being able to put miniatures on them and move ‘em around, but admit it, they’re just not the coolest looking things. But then you have some cool printed ships to choose from. And they have price tags. But for me this is another example of there being no way I would ever try to build a ship on my own instead of buying one of these, I mean unless I just really wanted to build my own ship. I mean, this one’s between $90 and a $120 depending on the scale you get – there’s no way I could scratch build something like this in any reasonable time frame that would make home crafting a viable alternative to just buying this model. And I would buy it in 32mm scale. 

Now there are all kinds of other examples – like resin trees for instance. I don’t think I’d ever buy trees like this, I would just make some out of flock or the cheap model railroad trees you can get on Amazon. I’ve even got a few Woodland Scenics tree kits, and while those aren’t necessarily cheap, they’re cheaper by far than stuff like this. Again, this is all just personal preference!

We didn’t even talk about like dungeon tiles for DnD, which is kinda what Dwarven Forge started out their company with. I think Matt Mercer exclusively uses Dwarven Forge terrain for Critical Role, but you know, they have a production budget. I think dungeon tiles are probably best made at the home hobby desk, cause there are a bunch of cheap materials and simple crafting techniques shown off by a lot of excellent hobby channels. 

Or, you know, you can just draw on a twenty dollar dry erase battle map with a two dollar marker, which is, honestly, what I do most of the time. But I know that only works for tabletop rpgs, it’s not an option for wargames.

So, I guess in summary, what I’ve been getting at is that a lot of the time, buying some terrain is kinda preferable to crafting it, at least in my opinion.

If you guys have any suggestions for particular sellers online or brands of purchasable terrain you like or other ideas on how to craft or build terrain faster or cheaper at home, you know where to drop ‘em.

So go build something! Or maybe … go buy something! Yeah, that does seem a little weird to say out loud. 

Anyway, see ya!

You ever cruise through your local hobby or arts and crafts store and see tons of weird things you’re like, oh, I could build this thing outta that thing, or, man, those look cool, I could use them for this that and the other? I do that all the time. So the other day I was at Michael’s looking for some fake plants, cause you know, they always got those 40% off coupons, how can you let those go to waste, right? And I walked past their, I guess, decorative rocks aisle. I don’t know, had a bunch of jars of rocks and beads and I guess stuff you’d pour into a glass vase or something for display, and I saw these. Yeah, multi-colored chunks of glass that weren’t rounded off like beads or anything like that and I immediately thought they looked like crystal shards or ice and they’re the perfect size for 28mm tabletop terrain! 

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we do a crafting or painting episode the fourth Thursday of every month! So, you know, let’s head over to the old crafting table and see what we have to play with today.

So Michael’s has a variety of these glass rock chunks and I made some, what I’ll call “Crystal Scatter Terrain” a while ago, and this time when I was in there they had these brown pieces and they didn’t have those before. I thought they might be cool in a desert type of setting. I’ve never made any desert type terrain, so, hey, two birds one glass rock, right? Try new things, see what happens.

TLDR, I think the brown glass in the desert terrain actually is my favorite outta what we’re gonna make today.

Here’s another interesting note: when I saw this glass and was inspired to make some terrain, it actually inspired a whole biome in my homebrew D&D world. It probably has some official fancy fantasy name on the map – which I haven’t come up with yet – but in parenthesis on that world map, it’s gonna have the colloquial name, which is Glass Country. I know, super creative, right? But in the context of roaming around a world and someone says, oh yeah, those orcs fled into Glass Country, that’s got an intriguing ring to it. I mean, as a tourist, I’d go check out a place called Glass Country.

Of course the back story will be that Glass Country is the result of some ancient magical battle which either caused huge jagged shards of crystal to erupt from the ground or maybe mountains of crystal rained down in a cataclysmic barrage. Something like that. Anyway, so there’s huge cliffs and chunks of crystal sticking up outta the ground. Whatever, it’s cool fantasy terrain, right?

And it’ll work for skirmish games, wargames and RPGs, it’ll just be something a little unique on the table to move miniatures through.

So we’re gonna see what it’s like to work with this glass in combination with our other typical hobby terrain materials and we’re gonna encounter some problems and figure out some solutions. 

The first thing you gotta do is wash this stuff, for sure. It’s all dusty and gritty and you gotta get that stuff off so they can be glued and painted or whatever. I just used a cheap strainer to hold ‘em under the sink and just gave ‘em a good stir. Work in small batches to make them easier to work with and then I just laid them all out  on a beat up cookie sheet I keep around for hobby stuff.

After they’re washed I separated the chunks into various piles by size and color.

Now, before I started actually building pieces, I wanted to experiment a little bit with adhesive, i.e. how is this glass gonna get stuck to the terrain. As I mentioned, I made a batch of crystal scatter terrain pieces a while back and I learned a few things that time, the most important of which was how the glass, being transparent, allows the surface the glass is pressed against or glued to, to show through. This is a big issue because a lot of us make terrain out of insulation foam, which is typically either blue or pink. And of course I can only get the pink XPS foam. And having pink show through the glass on a piece of terrain just doesn’t work. And in, say, non-snowy or non-frozen terrain, having white show through the glass doesn’t really work either.

I did a couple tests off-camera where I just glued some pieces of glass to some pieces of foam in various ways. Obviously superglue is a non-starter cause it eats XPS foam, so the other options I tried were hot glue, gorilla glue and even straight up terrain paste. Cause that stuff typically dries pretty hard and usually locks in tiny rocks and stuff, so I thought I’d try it. I also tried spackle and ModPodge.

So the bottom line is, hot gluing the glass directly to the foam actually works the best, but it’s not infallible and it has that problem of seeing color through the glass. Gorilla glue works like a champ but that stuff foams up as it cures so it’s pretty hard to find a way to lock the chunk of glass down while the glue foams and cures. And it’s root beer colored, but it’s also semi-transparent, so you still get some color bleed through the glass. 

I put some brown and black tinted modpodge onto the foam and let that dry and then I hot glued the glass to that and that seemed to work – but you’ll see later that it doesn’t work 100% of the time. But I’ll show you how to fix it. This technique, in the end, I think is the most promising, other than of course being able to just super glue the glass down to an actual surface like cork or MDF. Which that actually works great but you do have that issue with the color if you – if the cork is too light or you know the MDF is too light or not the color you want to be seen through the glass, then you have this issue of trying to cover it with another substance.

The terrain paste and spackle were complete nonsense because under the glass, the goop has no way to dry, so while it dried on the surface, under the glass the goop was still wet after like four days.

I did also try just putting brown paint down and glueing to that, and it kinda worked but in a lot of cases you don’t want to glue to a layer of paint, because then the bond is only as strong as the paint bond, not the glue bond. But sometimes it can work, I mean, painting it directly onto the foam, the foam is porous so the paint kinda goes down in there and it still leaves room for adherence … so maybe it works. I’m not sure. But, I guess that’s what you wanna tune into these videos for is to have me tell you … how to not really do something.

All right, let’s get into the builds. So first thing, gotta cut out some bases from your preferred basing material. I’m using Sentra here but of course MDF or straight foam are typical bases. I gotta whole video on why I use Sentra – Pachow! I’ve always wanted to steal that from – I mean, make an homage to Tabletop Minions and Uncle Atom. So there, I did it, and now I’ll have to come up with my own thing. 

Anyway, I just cut out a bunch of random shapes, all in a basic “scatter” size, roughly three by six inches, and then beveled the edges and then gave ‘em the once over with some 320 grit sand paper.

Side note – I shot 75 minutes of footage for this cutting and sanding bit. I have got to better at this crafting video video production, cause that’s nonsense. That’s way too much footage.

Anyway, now we got some bases, we can start putting some foam down. Always try to keep in mind how miniatures will fit or stand on your terrain. I tell myself that all the time and somehow I always forget. Anyway, I just chopped some foam up, I’m using half inch XPS and I just hot glued some pieces down on various parts of the base plates and then trimmed slopes into the foam to blend it into the base perimeters. 

And then of course we gotta sculpt those chunks of foam into chunks of rock. I did my typical slash and scrape with a hobby knife, did some texturing by pressing rougher pieces of that glass into the foam and rolling it around and stabbing it in here and there, and that seemed to work pretty good. 

For the desert piece I cut the half inch foam down even more to make a very low rock. Oh yeah, I guess I should mention what my actual fabrication plan is. I’m going to make a piece of forest or green grassy type of terrain, a piece of desert terrain and a couple pieces of snowy terrain, which I’ve also never done, as far as terrain goes. And after this experience, I dislike miniature snow almost as much as I dislike real snow. It’s not that bad, the snow is fine but I gotta get better at making it look realistic. Cause you’ll see how basically I made what looks like frosted cakes.

Anyway, so to get a piece of this glass to look like it’s coming out of the ground, it just needs to, uh, come out of the ground. So I kinda shove a piece into the foam to make a general mark of the shape it’s gonna need and then I roughly cut a hole in the foam. I do try to make it as snug as possible, so I ere on the side of cutting out too little and then carving out little bits as I need cause you really want the glass to be flush with the foam. But that’s also virtually impossible and also not super duper important, it’s always fixable with some filler after the glass is glued in place. Just keep in mind you wanna tint whatever filler you use in case it’s not the color you want to see through the glass.

This piece is going to be forest type terrain piece and since there was a large flat open end, I figured that’s a good spot for some more cover. So I test fit a mini in the path between the rock and where I’m gonna put another piece of glass, make sure it fits, and now I know generally where to put the second piece of glass.

Now the Sentra is white, the foam is pink, so I’m mixing some brown and black paint into some modpodge and we’ll do that typical terrain sealing thing. Just paint it all over the foam and the base. Set that one aside to dry and we’ll work a bit on the desert piece. 

This is all the same process, using hot glue to attach the foam to the base, slicing it down and carving it up, punching in some texture – I actually really like how this piece is turning out. Instead of the typical dark brown modpodge I figured I’d put some ochre and light brown in the modpodge for this one’s base. All right, set this one aside to dry and onto the damn snow bases.

For the first snow one I decided to have two chunks of ice sprouting from the hillside. I did all the standard texturing on the foam rock but as you’ll soon see, that was literally a waste of time, cause I just cover it all completely in snow. Well, it wasn’t a waste of time, cause that’s how you learn, right? Well, it’s how I learn anyway – by making mistakes! Anyway, if I’d taken a bit more time, I would have made use of some of this nonsense texturing that I did and had some of it show through the snow, but … anyway. 

So for this one I put in some of the cheapy craft white paint and I was actually surprised at how well it covered. I thought for sure the cheap crappy craft paint would not do its job but the white seems to be one of the best colors! I am nothing if not constantly surprised.

So now for this last bit of snow terrain, I just found this one piece of glass that seemed like it would make the perfect hilltop – so I set out to sculpt a smashed cupcake looking thing. This one is truly an embarrassment but hey, just keep telling yourself “everything is a test, an experiment” and you’ll feel better. I don’t feel better cause I’m actually showing it to you, but you know, when you do something like this, you’ll feel better cause you ain’t gotta show it to nobody! 

I let the modpodge dry for a day, cause you know, I’m lazy, and now it’s time to actually attach all these chunks of glass. First off, I hot glued the embedded piece of glass in the foam rock and then I hot glued the freestanding piece of glass to the flat surface. Both of these, we’ll soon see, surprised me by seeming to work great and then failing down the timeline – but I also show you how I fix ‘em. It’s a pretty easy fix. The one going on the flat surface I plan to fill in around the edges with texture and flock, et cetera. 

Same concept here, I want a large chunk of crystal erupting from the desert rock and then there’s all this open space on the base. I figured there’s always rules for “rough terrain” in most games and this container of brown and white glass came with a bunch of small shards, so I thought it’d be cool to have a bunch of smaller pieces cluttering up one side of the scatter piece. Now you’ll see even more of my wasted time – I mean, experiments! – I’m putting down a mix of modpodge and beach sand with a little fine grain flock for flavor. 

Look at that, alliteration even in a crafting vid! 

I figure I’ll try letting the modpodge itself be the glue for these little pieces so I just stick ‘em in there and then sprinkle on a few bits of coarser debris – pay attention to my scientific technique here – and set it aside to dry. 

For the foresty base – yes, foresty is a word, I just smithed it – for this one I have a pretty standard recipe of gray craft paint going over the dark modpodge and some dark green for the non-rocky areas. Again, this is mostly an undercoat to hide any off-colors under the flock and as a base for dry brushing the rock. I slap down a little bit of a lighter green where I think there’ll be like a walking path sort of thing.

I put the glass cherry on top of the stupid melty cake thing and the sand goop seems great for the snow bases as well, even though it’s not really necessary. It does allow me to blend the melted cake into the flat base though.

I hot glue the “ice” shards into the better-looking snow piece and they look pretty cool coming out of the white rock.

Time for some dry brushing on the forest stone, typical light grays and whites, and then it’s time to break out the Citadel washes. I like putting down the Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade in different places and my favorite is the Athonian Camoshade, kind of a green brown that I like the look of on rocks sometimes. I add some Seraphim Sepia in spots too, just to really make the rock colors look random. 

Let’s do some tan and white dry brushing on the desert rock – man I really like how this one is turning out. I go with the same mix of washes except I stay away from the Camoshade this time. 

For the snow bases I just water down some of the white craft paint and slap it on to get that kinda recessed snow sort of look. Which again, won’t matter much cause of how I flock the piece in the end. Speaking of snow flock, I’ve got these two products that I haven’t hardly ever used. This stuff from Green Stuff World is sparkly, good for like ice dusting or adding sparkle to the top of white snow. This stuff from Huge Miniatures is really interesting, it somehow exists in these actual little snowball shapes, they look really good for snow drifts I think, but they can also be easily broken down into mush. 

I will say one thing though about this stuff – wear a respirator or some kind of dust mask when using it. It’s like finely ground fibre glass or something and it gets everywhere and it’s very light, so it floats in the air. I was a little horrified when I realized this, so just want to put that out there. I’d be real careful when using it.

I used some watered down PVA glue to add some darker, muddy texture to indicate a sort of worn path in the snow. Then I used more of the watery PVA glue to add the snow texture. I just kept adding that stuff and eventually I just covered the whole rock piece with it and banked it up around the glass piece on the flat end. I frosted the stupid cake, which actually made it look even more like something from Dolly Madison and I made sure to fill in the gap between the foam and the ice chunk on the top. I added more of the sparkly stuff across the snow and thought it might be cool to put some of those ice sparkles on the very top of the actual glass piece too, like frosted ice or something.

Using the watery PVA I put some green flocking on the upper surfaces of the forest rock. I do really like terrain that has rock peeking out from under grass and stuff, you know, like it’s moss, or whatever. I just like that look a lot and so I do this quite a bit on terrain pieces. I have various types and textures of flock and here I’m going to fail you as a YouTuber – I don’t know what brands or types of flock these are, cause I usually take the stuff out of it’s commercial packaging and put it in my own containers. My apologies for that. I do have the typical Woodland Scenics brand stuff, but I like some of the products I’ve gotten from a German company and some other places a lot more. I’ll try to find the names and put some links down below but I’m really sorry, no promises, cause I have to try to track them down and I don’t know if I remember – anyway, we’ll see if I can find ‘em for you guys. So, I put a mix of different flocks down, including some brown stuff for the path. 

And here, where I’m about to proudly show off the piece, the glass pops right out of the foam. From looking at it, the hot glue adhered perfectly well to the modpodge and foam but cleanly separated from the glass. I have my test piece still that was glued the exact same way and it’s really locked into the foam, so all I can think of is that each piece of glass is probably different insofar as how much texture it has for the glue to bite into. 

And here you can see the freestanding piece has also come loose! Dammit. But you know what you reach for when all else fails. That’s right, super glue fixes everything. I was a little concerned about using the CA glue on the foam but the foam seems to be totally sealed by the modpodge so I decided to try it. I dropped a bunch of extra thick CA glue into the hole in the foam, jammed that glass back in there and did NOT use any accelerant. I think kicker would have totally eaten into the foam through the modpodge. Now I don’t know that for sure, but I didn’t feel like risking that to save a few minutes of drying time. I also used superglue to reinforce the freestanding piece of glass and it all worked exactly like it was supposed to. I just added a few bits of foliage and flocking to cover up the seams, I think it looks great.

On the desert piece, I wanted to add some actual red sand I found in my Pile of Opportunity – Terrain edition – and I used it to blend in the edges of the desert stone. I’ve had this bag of gross-looking lichen for ages and i thought a couple bits of this would make appropriate dried up desert vegetation, but less is definitely more with this stuff for sure. 

Gamer Grass make some great products I like to use, again, no sponsorships here, they don’t even know I exist – but I have some of this really tall stuff that I don’t use much on mini bases cause it’s – because it’s so tall, but this seemed like a perfect application for it, so down it goes. 

Of course no terrain is complete with out some tufts from the Army Painter, right? You gotta put ‘em in there, it’s like mandatory or something.

And these Gamer Grass tufts, tall ones like the desert variety, is why I wanted to  make a snow base to begin with. I’ve had these for like three years and never had a chance to use them, so here we go! They actually look pretty great on the snow base, so these are win. Hundred percent. 

The forest base gets the full on tuft treatment too and I’m pretty liberal with ‘em here. I also just picked up this pack of ivy looking stuff from my local game store – Lost Planet – and I’m pretty smitten with these micro ivy leaves, I think they’re really cool. The matrix they come on, however, leaves a little to be desired. It’s basically a big rectangle of like nylon scratch pad or something. I thought it would be more easily pulled into strands, but all that said, it does look pretty decent on the base.

All right, here are the finished pieces. Overall, I’m happy with how the glass looks on each one, even the melted cake thing. The glass definitely works as ice in the snowy terrain, and even though it’s kinda weird and unique, the glass looks pretty cool in the other two types of terrain as well. 

If nothing else, these would be a surprise for your skirmish game opponent or your D&D players. I dig ‘em, but you let me know what you think. And also, let me know what other weird items you’ve run across that have inspired you to incorporate into your own terrain.

And always remember, keep on steady craftin’. 

Yes, that’s an homage, it ain’t theft. Or copyright infringement. Or trademark infringement. It’s just one YouTuber bowing to another. Link below if you don’t know who I’m homaging. 

Make something pretty! See ya!

They say that everyone knows the best way to prime MDF terrain is with a rattle can. Because MDF is water-absorbent and lacquers fill in better. But what if you live in an apartment or other space that is not conducive to rattle can spraying (like me)? Will primers fill in all that precision laser etched detail? Are your water-based paints gonna warp the material of those miniature buildings and barricades? What if we sealed the MDF first in a matte or gloss clear coat? Or does any of this nonsense matter at all?

Today we gonna find out, ‘cause not only am I’m new to MDF terrain, but I, ironically, have quite a bit of it buried in the Pile of Opportunity. And also, I like to share. 

[intro]

Welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we’re not embarrassed to be noobs and try out new things. I’m Ignatius and you’re you and we’re on this tabletop hobby journey together. 

So, as I said, I’m new to the whole laser-cut MDF terrain scene. There’s a ton of it out there and a few years ago, I imported some rather … large collections of MDF terrain kits from England and Australia. Specifically from TT Combat and Knights of Dice. And on top of that, I’ve already built all the kits. That’s right. Mostly while watching Season Two of Critical Role. Yeah, I’ve had these things for a while. Anyway, the point here is that I have a ton of miniature buildings to paint up and I’ve never painted a lick of MDF.

I’ve chosen the most basic, simple, almost throw-away model I have in my collection to run today’s tests on. Actually, this entire video production is a test for me – I’ve never produced a “work desk slash tutorial” type of video before and the process definitely has a learning curve to it. So I’ve tried my best and I’ve learned quite a bit about the actual shooting side of things, so hopefully in the future I’ll get better at making this type of content.

That all said, when looking at this MDF terrain, the first thing I notice is how fine the detail is on these things. I was kinda worried that primer and paint might fill in all this stuff, and I’ve heard from various sources online that detail could in fact be lost depending on the type of paint or primer you use. The MDF itself has a tooth to it that creates this subtle texture and I didn’t know what to expect putting paint over that either.  

Real quick, for those of you that wanna know, MDF stands for Medium Density Fibreboard. It’s made by breaking down hard or softwood into fine particles, and then re-combining those particles with wax and a resin binder to create a workable end material. Terrain kits are made out of pretty thin sheets of this stuff, thin enough that prosumer-grade lasers can cut right through it. And also etch in all these tiny details. And the details are actually really cool and I definitely didn’t wanna lose any of that if possible.

I glued up the kits with wood glue and as you can see, the parts don’t always go together as easily as you’d hope and I didn’t always take the time to be super-precise. You could put a lot of work into these kits to make really tight, finished display pieces out of them, like sanding and filling the flat dovetail joints, et cetera. But, really, we’re tabletop hobbyists – who’s got time for that? We wanna role some dice!

All right, enough of my excuses, let’s get on with it. Keep in mind this is just a series of tests and I’m not finishing the model up for this video – we just wanna see how the different primer techniques work. I’ll most likely repaint this entire model at some point to actually finish it up.

I wanna try out five specific techniques:

One, airbrushing acrylic primer. Here I’m gonna use Stynylrez gray. Cause that’s what I got. I like this primer, I haven’t tried Vallejo or ProAcryl, or some of the other brands, maybe I’ll try something new after I use all this stuff up. 

Two, airbrushing matte varnish followed by primer. Here I’ll use Vallejo’s Mecha flat varnish. I seal my minis with this stuff all the time.

Three, airbrushing gloss varnish followed by matte varnish followed by primer. I’m sure this sounds ridiculous. The idea with this one is that gloss varnish is typically much more durable and protective than matte varnish and I’m wondering if it might seal the MDF better than just matte varnish on it’s own. The matte will go over the gloss to bring back some tooth for the primer to bite into.

Four, hand painting on a coat of Modpodge and paint mix. I’m planning to use acrylic inks to tint the modpodge – spoiler: that doesn’t go well, so I end up using, well, you’ll see.

and Five, just airbrushing paint right onto the MDF.

I’m using one of the cheapest airbrushes available, the classic $30 Masters G233, cause that’s the only airbrush I own. And I use it for two things: priming miniatures and clear coating them after they’re painted. Here’s an interesting detail about that airbrush: apparently Iwata failed to protect it’s patent on it’s general internal airbrush design at some point and so this brush right here is almost an identical copy of the Iwata HP-C. Now it’s parts quality and machining are almost definitely not up to par with an Iwata’s but still, I think that’s funny. Anyway, this brush is what I call a beater, you can push a lotta crap through it and if it jams up beyond repair, just order a new one. All that said, I do clean this thing after each use and it’s worked fine for me for years. I’ve only ever used the largest needle for paint volume, but one day I wanna try the smaller needles and see if this thing can actually do any kind of detail work. 

And that said, let me declare “I declare” I am not savvy with airbrush work. Dumping primer on a model is one thing, doing actual artistic paintwork with an airbrush is definitely another.

All right, first thing I did was label each wall with the technique I planned to use on it so I could keep track after the primer and paint went on. I started out with the gloss varnish, since it’s the lowest level of application. I use a bit of airbrush thinner or flow improver with the clear varnishes, it just seems to help stop clogging in the brush. I just use a bit, I don’t thin the varnish nearly as much as I would actual paint.

After cleaning the gloss out of the brush, I gave the gloss coat a bit of time to dry and then I put down the matte coat over the gloss … and over the raw MDF on this face of the building.

Then it was time for the gray primer and I was instantly surprised by what happened. It seemed to highlight the surface details really well. Didn’t seem to fill in anything. The MDF does seem to soak up a bit of the primer but nothing like I was led to believe was gonna happen. I sprayed a pretty liberal amount of primer just to see what it did. To be honest, the primer going right over the MDF itself seems to work great.

So onto the ModPodge. As you can see, the acrylic inks reacted … weird. It’s like the inks congealed into colored sand or something. My inks are fairly old, I guess, I mean I don’t know what qualifies as old for artist’s inks, they’re a few years old for sure, but as you can see here I put some on the paper just to see if there were chunks or anything but it looked fine. It’s just the ModPodge looks like cream of wheat cereal or something. So, craft paint to the rescue! This is typically what I put into the ModPodge for base coating terrain foam pieces, I just thought the inks would be cool to use. Apparently not. Anyway, I slapped the tinted ModPodge down kinda like normal, maybe a “little” thinner than I would have on foam pieces, but I just wanted to see what it would do to the detail etched into the MDF. As you can see, the ModPodge is not great at going on smooth, which is typically fine for rougher, organic ground-type terrain. 

All right, let’s take a look at the base coat results. The ModPodge dried as expected, little bit gloopy, got some nice runs in there, has that kinda smooth, sealed finish. Not sure what it’s done to the details yet, we’ll see with paint on top of it. The straight primer side looks awesome. The MDF still has a relatively rough texture but in scale it’s actually very fine. The details are sharp and there doesn’t seem to be any filling of the etched lines anywhere. The lines in the roof are particularly shallow but they show up with no problem. 

Now the side with matte varnish under the primer looks a tiny bit rougher but it’s barely perceptible. It does feel … hardier? I guess is the word. Visually it just seems to have a bit more of that micro-stucco look – again, barely perceptible. The double varnished side, with gloss under the matte coat and primer on top, has an even more pronounced micro-stucco look and feel. But again, this isn’t something that’s gonna be noticeable on the tabletop at all. It’s very subtle, but you know it is there. Still, all that said, the details remained crisp.

Okay, now for some paint. I’m trying out a line I’ve never used before, some Army Painter airbrush paints. I don’t like regular Army Painter paints, but I do like their washes. Of course, right? But this brand of airbrush paints is probably the most economical line of airbrush paints on the market. I got a small selection of colors I thought I’d make use of in terrain painting. I started out using a fairly dark brown but it ended up being very close to the primer color so I switched to a lighter brown for better contrast – you know, so we can actually see the paint going on. 

Side note about airbrush paints, I understand that these are just convenience purchases, obviously you can thin down any paint and shove it through an airbrush. But you know we all like to try out new tools and paints and whatever else we can spend our hard earned ducats on in this hobby! It’s an affliction, leave us alone!  You can see my expert airbrushing skills on full display here, those overcharged air pressure splatters are completely intentional and artfully placed. Don’t argue with the artist. 

Now just to see what it’s like I thought I’d slap some craft paint over the roof since that’s the typical technique I use for sort of basing organic terrain features. Just mixing some in here and there, bit of streaking to discolor the roof, maybe go for a mossy sorta thing, simple, fast and definitely not how I would approach an actual terrain piece like this. Rough, slapdash organic techniques like this can totally work – if you’re a better artist than I, but I can already tell I’m gonna wanna do some full-on paint jobs on these buildings, using the airbrush for the base coats and then of course some actual try-hard dry brushing (as opposed to this nonsense you see here, where I’m just knocking paint around to see what the MDF is like). The texture is so fine on this model that haphazard dry brushing like this isn’t gonna pick out a lot of detail because the detail just isn’t pronounced enough for that kinda thing. 

Oh yeah, here’s just putting some paint directly on the MDF and to be honest, it seems to work just fine. I’ve said “fine” a lot in this video and it’s starting to bother me. The material does soak up a bit of paint, so two or three coats are probably necessary, but in the end, this could work just fine – good lord! 

I imagine for myself though I’ll be going with the primer coat and then matte sealing a completed paint job – probably with gloss and then matte over that. To really kick in the durability of terrain like this, I would prefer to hard coat the pieces with industrial rattle can varnish because those products are typically much stronger than this hobby acrylic stuff, but as I mentioned, I’m just not in a place where I can easily make use of rattle cans. 

You ever spray lacquer in your apartment? Yeah that … that’s a mistake.

All right, so the overall end results and my opinions on these tests. TLDR – which I guess this should have gone at the beginning so you didn’t have to skip through this entire video … All right, TLDR, my favorite technique and the one I’ll go with in the future is just laying down primer and then paint with an airbrush. Weathering, washes and details can go on with regular brushes after that. The sides with the matte and the gloss plus matte undercoats do seem to be a tick “harder”, they feel a bit more solid or protected. That’s to be expected, but I don’t think the time and expense of laying down those sealing layers is really worth it in the long run. The paint and primer coat seems hardy enough and nothing rubs off when I give it a good scrub. 

All in all this has been a pretty worthwhile experiment for me – now I know what the details will look like after paint, which was the thing I was most interested in. And I’m actually surprised at how well the details hold up, even with that thick-ass ModPodge the details are still mostly there. 

All right, that wraps it up. For me a success, for you probably a boring video that needed the TLDR at the beginning and not the end. But hopefully and if you live in a space where you can’t rattle can and you’ve got a cheap airbrush, and you haven’t worked with MDF terrain kits before – that’s a lotta caveats – maybe this information has helped a little bit. 

These terrain kits are actually really cool. This one is very very simple in detail. I’ve got plenty of others that are really nice.

All right, well … go paint something! See ya!