The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Gunfire…

So, you got the new 5th Edition Manual and you get out on the battlefield. You’re doing alright except for one thing: you have no suitable hills now. In 4th, things were a little more abstract. If you and your opponent agreed that a hill was a hill, it probably blocked line of sight. Now, with the true line of sight rules in 5th, you’ve got nothing to hide a squad behind, much less a tank. Well, never fear! A lot of people are going to be building real hills so I think it’s time for me to show you how!

For our hill building, you are going to need the following tools:

Hot wire foam cutter ($6-15 from a hobby store)
Batteries (the foam cutter will suck them up a bit)
A marker or highlighter

You will also need the following supplies:

Glue (Good old school white glue is fine)
¾” Pink insulation foam board ($9 for a 4’x 8’ sheet)

The foam board is where it all begins. I use ¾” pink foam board (which actually, isn’t foam. It’s fiberglass). Some people use blue foam because it’s thicker, but I think pink foam has more uses for crafting so it’s better in my opinion to have more pink foam that you will use than to have two separate types of foam for different things. Of course, if you’re more serious than I am, that may work for you. On the other hand, if you’re more serious than I am, you probably already have hills! If you use the pink foam, I recommend you prepare it before use. You’ll notice that there’s a clear thin plastic sheet on each side of the foam. Peel it off. You’ll smell a chemical scent from the newly exposed foam. That’s why you’ll want to put it into a well ventilated area for a while to dry out. As far as I know, it’s not dangerous but I don’t want to take that chance with any of our loyal readers. Once it’s dried out (and you don’t smell it [trust me, you’ll know what I mean]), we can begin.

Cut the foam into smaller sheets. Then glue several sheets together.


Scale is something to think about. Most everything states that 3” up is equivalent to going up a level/upstairs/whatever. That would mean four sheets would be one level up. However, I use 3 as a level. It’s a bit of an aesthetic thing. I think the slightly smaller hill looks better and the disparity doesn’t become obvious unless you have 4 or five levels up or down. And with true line of sight, the disparity actually has no actual meaning any longer. Go a little taller if you want, I’ll stay a little shorter. As Bob Ross might have said, it’s your hill and you can make it as tall or as small as you want it.

I use toothpicks to provide stability and keep the sheets from slipping. Put them in at multiple angles but not far enough to poke out the other sides and keep them more towards the center if you can. Use cutters of something to cut off any ends that might still be sticking out. You may also want to put some glue into the toothpick holes if you can. Once it’s glued, let if sit for a while and dry. An hour or two should suffice, but you know your conditions a little better than I do.


When you’re ready, you want to take your glued stacks outside or into a well ventilated area (trust me, you want to do this outside). Take your marker and draw a ring around the area you want to be the top of your hill. A rough representation will do, but you want to make sure that it is away from the edges.

Take the hot knife and start cutting around the ring. You’re probably not going to want to do this straight on. You want to do it more at an angle which is why you don’t want the ring you draw to be too close to the edges. That way the hills you make will slope. Of course, you’re not entirely bound to that. Cutting it straight creates cliffs and dropoffs. You might want to vary up the angle you’re cutting at to create more interesting looking hills, sloping from one direction but sheer cliff on another side. Another thing you’ll notice is that as you cut, it’ll sometimes seem to drag and cut a little raggedly. That’s fine. In fact, I think it’s preferred. That way, the sloping will look a little more like the rough sides of many hills. Remember, the cutting will release fumes, but this isn’t Styrofoam, it’s fiberglass. As a result, it won’t be anywhere near as bad but fumes will still occur. Also don’t think you have to cut this all in one continuously perfect piece. Cut off a piece and then cut off some more. If you don’t like the way something is looking, cut until you like it. Pull out a utility knife or an exacto and gouge it up further it you want. Only you know what you want it to look like. Once you’re done, you may want to take some fine sandpaper around the edges to knock off any look strands of fiberglass. I personally just rub my finger around the edge to clean it up. If you do this, remember that fiberglass can pierce your skin or get on you and be really uncomfortable (if you’ve ever cut fiberglass duct, you know what I mean) so be careful.


You should end up with something that looks kinda like this:


It’s a hill! Note you can easily put a squad on top of it.


Notice how it looks from a sergeant's eyeview...

Too bad he can't see the Land Raider supporting them. What Land Raider?

THAT Land Raider.

If you make it big enough in area, you can place smaller hills on top of it to make bigger hills and still have places to stand buildings or vehicles.


If you have something with a cliff side, you can not only represent hard climbs, but you can also combine with buildings to give a mountain village kind of look. This is the best argument for your building and hills to be at a uniform level.

But who wants a pink hill? That’s why you get your favorite color of craft paint for such things (I use golden brown Delta Ceramcoat) and paint the muther some color other than pink as you probably noticed I did with the second hill. You’ll probably want to use more than one coat because the bright pink will show through a thin coat. Or, if you want, you can spray paint it! It’s not foam! It’s fiberglass! The spray paint won’t melt the hill!

Flock or don’t flock. Base or don’t base. It’s up to you. All that matters is that you have a hill that has a chance of actually hiding units. Now make some more!

What the FLOCK?!?!?

So, sometimes gamers get bored. Or they're looking for a new challenge. Or they're just cheap. Whichever one of them you are, well this might be for you. So I got to thinking a few weeks ago "Maybe I'd like a bunch of flock to flock minis." My club mates can attest to how big a deal that is since I have 9K-ish points of Space Marines and not one of them is flocked. But I don't want to spend a lot of money on flock. So I decided to start making my own. And here's how I did it!

Tools:

containers (cheap and/or probably around the house)
stirrers (old brushes, pens, whatever)
cookie sheet ($1.50)
strainer ($1.50)
tea leaf ball ($1.50)

Ingredients:

sawdust: sawdust from a wood shop or mill would probably be best, especially from sanding or a lathe, but I grabbed a plastic bag full from Home Despot around the corner from my apartment. They pay to get rid of it so they really don't care.


paint: Actually, some thoughts on that... Don't use GW paint. There's not enough and it's expensive. :) You want to get a cheap acrylic or tempera or something. Kids paints are the goal. Lots of paint, really cheap. Each of those bottles you see there cost about $2 each. I use the acrylics on buildings and such but I got the tempera just for flock. Just make sure you get paints that are much brighter than what you want to flock to look like because the brown of the sawdust will make it much darker.


water: you have a sink, right?

And now, to the work!

Step 1: mix paint and water

Mix paint and water in a container. Simple enough. You don't want it to be translucent but as you experiment (assuming you'll make more than one color/batch of flock) you may want a little more or less paint. Be prepared to maybe mix paints if you want something specific. I also happen to have a cheap ass blender. You could use that too, but I think if you want to use an appliance, a mixer would be better than a blender, but that's not important right now.

Step 2: stir in sawdust

Put in sawdust a little bit at a time and stir. Keep adding more and keep stirring until it starts getting a little hard to stir. You don't want liquid and paint to be left over. If you see the color and it's off, you can add more paint, but you don't want to if you don't have to. If you do, make sure you mix it all in throughly.

Step 3: spread it out flat and let it dry

Spread the gloop out on a cookie sheet fairly thinly. It'll probably look something like this:

...and it will be wet and sticky so be careful what you touch. Once you've done that, you want to put it in a warm dry place and let it dry out. Lately, it's been a little rainy around here so I instead have opted to put it in the oven. If you do that, you don't want it very hot. The warm setting should do the job. You could even go as high as 200 degrees, but you don't want it to be too hot. This is wood, after all. Either way, oven or sitting out, let it dry out.

Step 4: Put the dry mixture in another container and get ready to strain

If it's all been done correctly, the gloop, as it dried, should have broken apart into its constituent particles. It should all come apart easily. If it dries as hard pieces, toss it aside and start again, though I've yet to have this happen.


Take your strainer and strain out the big bits. Keep them for rocks and big bits or toss them. Either way, you should end up with something like this:


This is a fairly coarse flock that, while not the quality of professional flock, looks pretty decently like grass. The tea leaf ball is better than the strainer so when you're left with just the coarse flock, use the tea ball to strain the coarse flock and you'll end up with this:


It feels really soft and fuzzy. There's a lot of this finer stuff in with the coarse flock, but I don't have the need or the patience to get it all out. You, however, can get all you want.

And that's it! Thus far, in three days, I've made two batches, one green and one yellow (which looks a little like dead grass), and have just pulled a third out of the oven for straining tomorrow.


And there's a lot of it! Of course, the "big cost" is the tools, but some of these you probably have around the house. I bought everything and I have made these three batches for less than the cost of two bags at a store. Now that I have everything, the only real cost is more paint and that big $2 bottle should make around 15 batches. That's a crap load of flock. In fact, when I'm done flocking my minis, I'm going to flock my hills and some of my other terrain, but that is a story for another article...