I needed some scenery for my new rule set and as it is based on steam ships on the ocean, I decided that the scenery would be Islands.
I have made island scenery previously, but this time I wanted to make the new stuff even quicker and easier, so I put my thinking cap on and looked through all the bits and pieces around my room to see what I could use.
Well, I had a large piece of MDF board which would be perfect for the bases of the islands, so after about an hour or two I had my bases cut, shaped and sanded.
Next up I had to work out what I could use to make the basic islands, I have a few pieces of polystyrene in a box, a few off cuts from packing etc, but not really enough for the number of islands I wanted to make, also polystyrene is not great to work with and it is not very tough for lots of handling and storage.
So, I went through the rest of the bits I have and eventually picked thin card from some old cereal boxes, I have used the card many times for other modelling and I know that if coated in glue it dries really hard, so I started gluing bits to the island bases forming basic shapes of mountains.
At this point they didn’t look great, to be honest I wasn’t sure they would be any good, but I was already into half a pot of super glue (poundland cheap ones) so I decided to stick with it.
Well, when they were dry, I started to add some tissue pieces to the card, and plenty of PVA glue, this took a while… and a lot of PVA!
Still, it was fine as they were starting to look a little better than they were before I added the tissue.
After a few hours patiently watching glue dry… I had ten islands that didn’t look too bad, and they were rock hard.
Now it was time to get some paint out, first coat was a dark grey primer, once this was dry, I added a mix of brown and grey wash to the lower parts of the islands which gives a darker ‘earthy’ look around the mountain area.
Once all this was dry, I gave a light drybrush of a light grey (Wolf Grey) on the very top of all the detail on the mountains, then added a little white to this grey and did a final light drybrush on the vert top detail of the mountains.
That was all the painting on these islands all that was left was to add the trees / bushes.
Well modelling trees or bushes in this scale was not a thing I was even going to think about, so it was back to the way I did it on my previous islands and that was using green kitchen scourers, these are really cheap and once I had cut them up into small pieces and stuck onto the islands I think they pass as fairly good trees / bushes.
Once they were dry I hit the tops of these with a very light drybrush using a light green.
And that was that, ten islands ready for the gaming table, nice simple and quick.
Here are a few pics with a couple of 1/1200 Dystopian Wars ships to show the islands scale, I will be using these islands in some playtesting games using my new rules, watch out for the battle reports over the next few weeks.