How To Make Terrain For Your Miniatures tutorial

As always I want to share this quick tutorial on how to make nice terrain for your miniatures. The terrain ( hills ) I did here was designed and painted to look and match the Warmahordes aesthetics. The Hills was not designed to look realistic and the colors are brighter than usual.

The finished pieces are posted HERE.

You will need corkboard ( optional ), styropor, wood glue or white glue, texture paint or glue and sand, and paints ( use acrylic paints as toxic lacquer paints will melt away styropor ).

The outline photos below will guide you on how to make a quick terrain piece for your minis.

1. I used a 1/4 inch thick cork board as my main material on top as it is more durable than the usual styropor. You could use the packaging type styropor but I have a hard time cutting it to have a really flat top surface. I cut the cork board and the 1/2 thick styropor to my desired shape and glued them together.

2. Notice the light colored dots on the cork board? I inserted some satay sticks to keep them in place while the wood glue was curing. I then applied texture paint all over the piece to hide the actual texture of the styropor. You could apply the texture paints around the styropor only and retain the nice consistent texture of the cork board ( I know I will next time ). I also glued some aquarium pebbles all over to give it an additional texture.

The photo below shows the cured texture paint ( overnight curing ). Vallejo texture paints usually cure to a hard rubbery to rocky finish. Great stuff to produce those irregular textures on the sides of this hill. Now your hills is ready for painting!

3. Zenithal Priming as usual! I primed the whole piece with Russian Green primer ( preferably black ) and shot Vallejo White Surface Primer directly 90 degrees on top. Now I have a nice base coat that will affect the transparent paints on top later.

4. Base Coat - I sprayed some nice loud colors before the washes. Washes will always darken your work. So painting lighter base colors than the actual colors is highly recommended. Unless you like really dark toned pieces.

5. Dry brushed the main colors of the aquarium pebbles and the highlights. The photo below shows the pieces with highlights. The pieces are now ready for the washes.

6. Last step was to do the washes and a Matt Varnish topcoat. I wanted to finish these pieces already, so I discovered something! Instead of doing washes, I loaded my Vallejo Inks into my airbrush and did some post shading! Damn it worked like the old Tamiya Smoke, only better!

Why better you ask? Better because I have so many Vallejo Inks and Washes in different colors! lol

I hope you find this post helpful. Thanks as always for dropping by! Until next post guys! Just enjoy the hobby! :)