Very interesting topic !
Thanks.

Beautiful board mate, lots of goood tips and ideas.

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www.darkrealmminiatures.com

Nico your stuff continues to frighten, inspire and intimidate me with its perfection! Epic skills dude!

Nico, those look fantastic! And thanks for the very good instructions! I was immediately thrilled to try and build a hill myself.

Right now I am in the process of building a hill based on your description. I was just wondering, do you apply the static grass on a blackpainted surface or do you paint it green or brown before glueing the grass? And is there something I'll have to keep in mind when apllying the static grass? I never glued such a huge amount on a plain surface before, so i better ask before I  bugger it.

cheers sanjuro

Having worked on a fair bit of terrain myself I think I can answer your questions.

Always completely paint the piece first before applying any static grass. Paint on static grass never looks good.  

And if I were you I would use a 3:1 mix of wood glue (not pva glue) and water to apply your static grass to.

Wood Glue is tougher, waterproof, and just as easy to work with as pva glue. It also costs about the same (or the difference is negligible).

Believe me, after about a years worth of battles fought over that hill you'll be happy for the extra strength wood glue provides.

As a matter of fact I don't even own PVA glue. Wether I need to apply sand, grass, etc to whatever I always opt for wood glue.  

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-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

Well, yes and no

I agree: always paint your hill before applying flock or grass. After that you can however change the shade of your grass using thin washes (dark browns for example). For a withered look you can also carefully drubrush the grass bleached bone. This is obviously easier to control for smaller patches like titan bases or terrain pieces that just require small grassy areas. It does takes a bit of practice: Too much paint in the washes will flatten your grass and make it look sticky (might be interesting for a seaweed effect though) Same thing for the drybrushing: The brush needs to be very dry before you begin painting.
For large areas I'd be a bit carefull when using these techniques though. However I think you could get some very interesting results and nice variation of shades by carefully applying washes with different ammounts of paint in them. It will definitely help counter the "football-field" effect you sometimes get with large areas of static grass (or flock for that matter)

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Sofa General

Nobody expects the Inquisition!!!
http://theepiclounge.wordpress.com/

Thanks for the tips, guys!

And another question: What colour do you prefer to paint the model with for the space where you apply the grass?

Black, green or brown?

cheers sanjuro

Just paint the whole base as normal then decide where you want the grass to go. It doesn't need to be a different color.

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-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

Yeah I always messed up static grass washing and drybrushing.

Back in the day the only color static grass I could get was a sickly green that was almost a neon fluorescent color. I tried without success to change it's color. It came out "sticky" as you said.

Today I'm lucky enough to have both "dark Brown" and "honey wheat" colored grass to add to my normal green/brown mix.

Still if you were good enough to paint it I'm sure you could get a more dramatic, controlled effect by getting the highlights and shades just where you want thereby eliminating the random nature of static grass.

Still on larger projects (hills, game boards, etc) it's worth investing in a few different colors to add a natural varied look to your terrain.

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-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

I agree. I'm not really sure how resilient the technigue of shading or drybrushing static grass is to wear and tear. It is usually not an issue on miniature bases but there might be a good chance that the paint wears off when the grass is haneled alot. If you can get different colors of grass I'd probably go that route as well for large terrain pieces like hills.

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Sofa General

Nobody expects the Inquisition!!!
http://theepiclounge.wordpress.com/

@ Sanjuro : Well it seems that you already have your answers. Effectively, I paint the hill Green before gluing the static grass. Like Malakaï said, Wood glue is just perfect to me. I neither own PVA myself. With wood glue, your hills and boards will resist "soda tidal waves".

For the static grass painting debat, I don't spend time painting my static grass myself but I have seen good results of that technic (particulary on a Blood Bowl Pitch that look amazing using that technic). So with the few tips of WN you should try to have some good effects. It will surely looks good.

Hope you will post some pictures of your hills when they're done  

Ok, the first hill is ready. I learned some lessons when building this one with a friend:

- when using grey colour for the rocks, the rubble should be greyish as well

- I think Nico covered the whole hill with modelling paste (didn't you?), I didn't and so the styrofoam sucked quite a lot of black paint. Also, paint sticks better to modelling paste than to styrofoam.

- I am not sure what kind of glue you meant, since pva glue is called wood glue in Germany. I bought a bottle which was labeled wood glue, it was PVA. The only other stuff they had was polyurethane glue, but I didn't want to buy that one, since its toxic and I wasn't sure if it's the right stuff anyway. Any hints?

-apply  all grass in one swift move. At first, the hill looked like a golfing course, since I had applied the grass to neatly, forming a very straight line to the rubble. I then applied grass a second time, which resulted in different tones of grass. Nothing big, but avoidable.

So, I present The Hill    




Ulric the Slayer enjoying a recreational hike on his holiday

Nico, thanks again for this inspirational thread!  


cheers sanjuro

I'm guessing that the difference between PVA  craft glue and wood glue is water resistence.  Basically, it's a range of different formulations based on water solvent:

http://www.thistothat.com/glue/pva.shtml

also
http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=160725

One type is water soluble after it has dried, one is not.. or less so.  The difference is between this:
http://www.elmers.com/homerepair/produc ... pCode=E700

and
http://www.elmers.com/homerepair/produc ... pCode=E381

The trick is looking for non-toxic glues oriented to construction and woodworking, as opposed to scrapbooking, etc.

FWIW, the scrapbooking "glue all" is actually pretty good at securing miniatures to popsicle sticks for painting -- a nice temporary hold, until the sticks are submerged in water for a couple hours.

Well, it looks great. The whole hill is made of styrofoam ? It seems that you have not used pine barcks ?

To answer your question, I only used modelling past to fill the gaps between each pine barcks. Before painting I used to paint the whole piece of terrain with wood glue and lot of water (it must be very liquid, almost like water). Like this, it's easier to paint later and the whole piece is more resistant.

Happy to see that this thread inspire you. I find myself a lot of inspiration in articles from Carl Woodrow website or in thread of Warmaster Nice, Onyx and other members in this forum (and in the epic french forum to). I'm glad to add my little contibution to the community.

Hey Carrington, thanks for the thistothat link - what a useful resource!

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