Terrain: Water, Open Graves, Lava

 A large amount of the terrain I've been building has been restricted. I've built a Cygnar Watchtower, a Rhulic bunker, and a gallows (all in forthcoming articles here) and they're all restricted. So this week, I'm going to look at a few terrain pieces that you can actually walk on or through.

 

First, something relative simple: a lake. For this, I began with a base of thin plywood. It's difficult to cut, but when I've used balsa I've found that it warps. 

 

Trimming the corners from the plywood with a box cutter was difficult, but doable. From there, I rolled modeling clay into a tube and wrapped the edged to form a rim which would hold in the water. After the clay dried, I painted it brown and the bottom of the lake blue.

 

Lastly, the key step: soft clear-drying acrylic gel gloss which I picked up at the local hobby store. I spread that on, let it dry overnight, and voila. This one was easy.

Next up, a piece specific to steamroller 2021: The open grave terrain. It's specified as a piece 2 inches by 3 inches, so I cut the plywood to the correct size, and began with the same rim I'd put on the lake, painted brown. But this time, I first glued down some grass flock, and then some coarse sand on top. Again, quite easy.

The final piece was a bit less easy. Similarly to how I'd wanted a piece that caused continual corrosion when I created the sludgehouse, I wanted a terrain piece here which would cause continuous fire damage. "Burning Earth" sounds so generic. What about lava?

My inspiration began when I found a hunk of asphalt outside which looked like it might be volcanic rock. Throwing it against the ground a couple times broke off a few perfect-sized chunks for terrain.

I began with an oddly-shaped piece of thin plywood as a base, and created a deeper clay rim along three sides of the edge, thinking that the lava would be flowing up from underground. This rim got painted black, and I super glued appropriately-sized pieces of asphalt to it. Then I painted the center yellow, and after it dried I glued down more asphalt right into the center, for models to hop across the lava if they were feeling brave or fire-immune.
 

 

 

You can see my work-in-progress piece above, and the complete terrain piece below.

Orange went atop the yellow, and red atop the orange, providing that glow effect. I even watered down some black paint and dripped it in for that cooling-lava effect. After it was done, I applied glaze to the lava to make it look shiny and wet.

It's one of my heavier terrain pieces, due to all the asphalt, but that just means it won't slide around on the table accidentally as easily as the lighter pieces.