And now for a digression - shocked this is me you are reading so you should really know what to expect by now.
Making Hills.
To cut a long story short I decided to build some actual hills rather than use the for me traditional method of books or crude step hills under a blanket. The first of these was designed to support the
Warbases watch tower for Dux but to be honest the idea would work with any period and most scales.
I had Warbases cut a shape in 3mm MDF to act as the base, I could & indeed may in the future cut my own out of MDF with a fret saw but since I was ordering stuff from
Warbases it made it easier to get them to do it for me.
On top of this I built a contour hill of corrugated cardboard recovered from Esdevium boxes but any thick corrugated cardboard box will do until it was of a satisfactory height and steepness. Its important to keep an eye on this at this point as once the next stage begins it not going to b possible to go back & change this. It is also important to remember that wargames figures have to stand on the slopes so its probably going to be a fairly gentle hill unless you want to model a cliff or impassable slope on it. Over doing either would rather defeat the object witch is to get a realistic hill not one of the flat topped Messa's common on the wargames table.
Once the contour hill is completed satisfactorily you can move on to the stage of actually covering the contours to form the slopes, unless you are after a wooded hill (see latter).
To cover the hill I used torn newspaper of which I happen to have some about oddly enough. It is important to note that this is not
Papermache but individual strips. each strip was painted with PvA white glue & stuck to the contour hill, repeat this painting the paper to be applied and that already in situ and continue until a solid slope was formed this will take several layers and in the case of a large hill it is a good idea to do it over the period of a couple of days allowing the glue sodden paper to dry out.
Once the whole thing has dried out I painted it with Earth brown acrylic paint followed by white glue sprinkled it with sharp sand allowed to dry & then painted that earth brown & applied flock static grass and foam foliage to make the hill fir in with the rest of the scenery it was meant to go with in this case my DUX set.
Ginger
