Confessions of a Terrainiac

Howdy all,

You may have noticed things have been quiet around here. Sorry for that. I have been a bit busy with non-gaming stuff as well as without a good digicam for some time. I have, however, been busy on what I could make during my limited time and have managed to built up a massive amount of forest and jungle terrain using some new methods involving cork sheets.

I had originally made cheap homemade stuff using simple cardboard as the base. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. Then I read on Lead Adventure about method for building effective woodland terrain bases using spare CDs and pieces of cork board torn off and stacked into irregular forms.

This method worked really nicely and produced a good, natural-style shape that required little if no work to make presentable. Stacking it in varying thicknesses and configurations produced anything froma low earthy build up, to a steep-sided rocky outcropping. All that really needed to be done was to paint it up with a loose drybrushing of a few colors and attaching some plastic foliage (purchased in the flower arrangement section of the local crafts superstore). I also attached twigs and sticks to mine, because I like tree trunks in my forests.

The learning curve on this was phenominally fast and from batch to batch I found my abilities with the cork and the techniques of arranging the surfacing colors grew so fast that I will be going back to touch up my earlier pieces. I also found that I could touch up the carboard based pieces.

This terrain project was hugely fun and I ended up figuring out how to make all sorts of fun things out of the cork including such nifty bits as rocky outcroppings, sandstone/desert rocks, and even termite mounds. Now, none of these are accurate models of any of this, but they are darned nice looking for tabletop terrain. Heck, I even figured out how to make free-standing boulders by carefully layering and shaping the cork scraps.

That's a good point to make real quick - DON'T THROW ANY OF THE CORK SCRAPS AWAY!

The cork scraps can be used for roughing up flat surfaces and I even mixed some of the crumbly bits into the surfacing paints to add more earthy lumps to the surfaces being painted.

This is more of a brief overview of what I have been up to. I'll be putting up some specific examples of simple, but nice projects as time allows.