I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone

Before I get started, I thought I would show the complete list of raw materials I used to make this.  The reason for this is that you can use these materials and methods for a whole host of scenic projects for wargaming tables and so it might show you some useful items to buy.  There is one item missing from the photo and that is purely because I took the photograph after the fact and I didn’t have any left to photograph.

Shown in the image, as numbered

1. XPS foam sheets
2. Woodland Scenics Realistic Water
3. Woodland Scenics Water Effects
4. All purpose wall filler
5. PVA Wood glue
6. Ready Made Base Mix
7. Flower Tufts
8. Small stones
9. Grass Tufts

Not shown in the image is some clump foliage.

To go into a few specifics for this project, the base mix was from Geek Gaming Scenics and I used their Fields of New Zealand.   The flower tufts are from Gamers Grass and I used purple and yellow and the grass tufts were from a company called Serious Play who appear to have ceased trading.  However I used a mixture of green and brown and these are colours that are readily available from other companies such as Gamers Grass.  You will also notice I didn’t buy glue from a wargaming company – if you want to make scenery you will need a lot of PVA glue and it is much cheaper to buy the larger pots of glue from DIY shops.

All of these things will be incredibly useful for making generic scenery, especially for fantasy and medieval games, although obviously the specific colours and tones that you use will be unique to your project.  I have provided links to the products I used but other manufacturers are available.  I don’t really have any particular brand loyalty, these are just what I happaned to have in my cupboard.  The eagle eyed among you will have noticed there is no link to the stones.  You can buy stones of varying sizes from Geek Gaming Scenics, but seriously, just go outside, find a gravel carpark or playground and grab a handful.  That’s what I did.

The first step to making the diorama was to make the basic underlying structure, which was made using XPS foam.  For this I used 3 layers of 6mm foam.  Starting with the lowest layer, which is the largest, I drew around the base that I was going to mount this onto create a circle.  This gave me the basic foot print which I then took a chunk out of where I wanted a stream to run.  I then drew around the this shape to create the second layer, From this I then took a small amount off the back (the edge furthest away from the stream) and a larger amount from the front.  As with the bottom layer, I also cut out chuck to map the course of the stream.  Finally, to make the top layer I drew aound the middle layer and once again I took a small amount from the back and a larger amount from the front.  However, at this level, the stream would simply disect the entire piece which then created two separate pieces representing opposite banks of the stream.  These were then glued on top of each other as shown, which creates a step effect.  It doesn’t mater so much if the edges of the foam aren’t smoothly cut as this will be covered in the later stages, you just want to create some contours to create some relief

The next step is to create the basic shape of the land.  For this I used some small stones and all purpose filler.  Some people use sculptamould for this and for larger items and projects I do too.  However in this case, the wall filler dries much more quickly, and I was against the clock here.  Having something that dries in a matter of hours so you can continue working is a real benefit.  Sculptamould tendsto take 24+ hours to dry and I simply didn’t have that sort of time.  I first glued the stones onto the foam where I wanted them to be, a couple of large boulders on the hillside and some smaller rocks in the stream.  Then I coated the whole thing in filler, smoothing it out into a nice slope so that you could not see the contours of the foam underneath. I also used the filler to mask the base of the stones, making them look like they’re embedded into the ground rather than strewn across it.  When it was dried, I gave it a rubdown with some sand paper to smooth off some of the rough patches – which you always get when using filler.  As with the rough edges of the foam, it isn’t necessary to get this perfectly smooth.  In the subsequent steps, this will be covered by textured surfacing, so as long as you don’t have any massive peaks and troughs, you won’t be able to see this when it’s finished.

I had purchased a glass cloche from Hobby Craft to use as a presentation base and it was time to mount the diorama on the base.  In an ideal world, I would have been able to leave this step until the end and in hindsight, I have thought of a way that I could do this.  However in my rush to complete the work I had overlooked such considerations.  Doing it this way meant that I had to be a lot more careful when I was working not to get glue inside the groove where the glass dome would sit and this slowed things down a bit.  I was forced to both work slower when adding PVA glue and also to stop and clean when anything splashed into the groove.

However, design flaws aside, it was at this stage that I also added the last few stones to the model.    I added more rocks to the lowest section of the stream, I used some gravel to create the stream bed (which I added after the photo was taken – sorry) and I also added some patches of gravel around the base of the larger rocks.  As a final step, I also used some more filler to blend the whole piece into the base.

Something worth noting here is that while I created fairly smooth slopes on each side of the stream, I did not smooth the contours out inside the stream itself.  I was quite happy to have a much rougher descent as this would allow me to create a more fast flowing look to the water. using small waterfalls

With the basic structure essentially complete, the next thing to do was add a base layer of paint.  This would ensure that once the surfaces coverings were added later, they would be done against a darker, more earthy background rather than white.  This provided a much more realistic effect as you can always see some of the underlying material through whatever coating you use and that white really stands out.  I used a dark brown (Oak Brown from army painter I think) however for larger scenery pieces I have a very larg tub of Burnt Umber from Daler Rowney – using minuature paints for scenery pieces gets expensive very quickly due to the volumes required.

I also stippled some additional tones onto the rocks – a red brown and a sandy brown.  These add some underlying texture to the rocks, such as lichens or weather staining.  I also applied this to the stream bed.

At this point, you can start to see the scene taking shape.  First, all of the rocks were drybrushed.  I used a series of greys to drybrush the larger rocks and stones and for the stream bed I used warm greys (Castle Grey and Gargolye Grey from Army Painter), which creates a discoloured, sandy look to the stream bed and a cleaner, more weather worn look to the boulders.

Next, I painted all of the other areas with PVA glue and scattered some of the Fields of New Zealand base mix. Initially I had planned to add a dusting of green fine turf over the top, as the image on the website looked quite grey and a little washed out.  However when it arrived, it had a much warmer, green/yellow tone to it which I thought looked absolutely perfect for open moorland.

As a final touch, I also added some green flock around the smaller patches of gravel at the base of the boulder, just to break the texture up a little.  This was done by using waterd down PVA, which ran into the recesses and gently wiping the raised areas with a cotton bud to remove the glue.  This allowd the flock to stick in the recesses, like grass growing around the rocks and also meant that when it was dry, the few stray bits that had stuck to the raised areas were easy to dust off.

It is fair to say that this stage took up probably the most time of any stage.  I do quite like the Woodland Scenics Realistic Water Effects, but like a lot of resins, it takes a long time to cure.  It’s perfect for projects of this scale but it really needs to be done in layers and each layer takes up to a day to dry.  In all I did three pours for this and if you look at the top and bottom of the stream, where the water is the deepest, the last pour was probably a little too deep.  It was also quite hard to stop the stuff from leaking down the front and back, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t seem to seal the ends to keep the resin in place, probably due to the fact that by this stage, the edges had been flocked and sanded and were not smooth, meaning there were almost certainly gaps that I just couldn’t see.

In the photo, some of the water has a slightly cloudy look to it – that’s just because the resin wasn’t fully cured when the picture was taken.  However I think you can start to see what the stream looked like

This step is a collection of a number of tasks that bring life to the scene.  These were:

• Adding some vegetation
• Creating water texture
• General tidying
• Adding the figures

The first step was adding vegetation, which was done using gras and flower tufts and some clump foliage.  I picked a deliberate colour palette for this which is intended to mirror some of the wilder parts of my native Britain.  I used a mid green for the grass tufts as this was a close match for the basic earth covering I had used.  I added few of these around the large boulders as you quite often see larger clumps of grass growing around the bases of rocks out on the hills. I also added some red/brown coloured tufts around the edges of the water, similar to reeds and rushes.  To add some colour, I used purple flower tufts to represent heather and I used yellow tufts, placed around dark green clump folioage to represent gorse.  Both of these plants are incredibly common in Britain, in places like the Pennines and the Highlands.  The key here was to create some versimilitude, rather than necessarily accuracy.  It was quite a small surface area and the tufts were added to create the impression of something rather than a reality.  Gorse and heather tend to grow in such a way that they cover large areas, you probably wouldn’t see small patches of either, as I have done here.  But by doing it like this, it adds some vibrancy to the scene using a colour palette that is consistent with what is trying to be portrayed.

The next step was to add the water texture.  This was done using Woodland Scenics Water Effects which is basically a thicker version of the Realistic Water Effect.  It is a paste that comes in a squeezy bottle which can then be manipulated with a variety of tools and spreaders.  You can create build ups of water on the upstream side of rocks, create ripples and waves and generally make the water appear to be flowing.  In the image, it’s all white but it dries clear, again the photo was taken before it had dried.  That said, once it had dried, I did pick out some of the raised areas with some thinned down white paint.

While the water effect was drying, I did some general tidying up.  There were a few patches where the base mix hadn’t covered properly, some areas had chipped and you could see the white filler all of which needed to be covered up.  At this stage I also made an executive decision to paint the base black.  I had wanted to leave it stained using the woodstain, however the one I got was not a wooden base, it was MDF.  The top surface had a wood effect etched into it, but the sides were just a flat, textureless surface, some of which had actually started to split (which may have been due to the woodstain).  So I coated the whole base in PVA to seal it properly and also stop any splits from getting worse, then I painted the base black.

Last, but not least, I mounted the figures, which I had painted some weeks prior.  I used Aragorn the King for this, as I thought it was perhaps a more fitting representation of the Groom than Aragorn the ranger.  As for Arwen, there wasn’t really a great deal of choice – it was this one or nothing.