Terrain Talk Pt. 25 – Craters!

Want a super cheap, super simple way to spice up your battlefield? Step this way folks!

When you think about it, craters are an essential part of battlefield terrain – any location that has been fought over for any length of time will bear the scars of anything from hand grenade explosions to artillery and airstrikes – and sadly, you only have to switch on the news these days to get inspiration from any number of locations…

But you didn’t come here to get depressed, did you? You came here to learn how to MAKE STUFF. So let’s MAKE STUFF.

We begin with some old CDs – printer drivers, demos, old antivirus stuff… we’ve all got tons of the things lying around. Stick them in a big plastic bowl, boil the kettle, pour the boiling water over them and leave them for five minutes or so – that will make them soft enough to cut with a sturdy pair of kitchen scissors. To be fair, you could skip this step entirely if you don’t mind your craters being Perfectly Circular, but my hobby OCD has a few things to say about that one. I also cut out random shapes of cardboard to go over the hole in the middle of the CD and glued them on with PVA.

Next up, I created the lpip of the crater using acrylic filler or “caulk” squirted out and smoothed on to the CD base, shaping it with my fingers to get the sides sloping the way I wanted them to. I also took this chance to embed some (clean) cat litter into the calk to break up the texture a bit.

When this had all dried, on went the texture paste – a mix of PVA, filler powder and grit all smooshed together. I also mix some black craft paint into this stuff as it shows me where I’ve painted it all and acts as a sort of pre-prime layer. I also drizzled PVA on and scattered more kitty litter for rock/ rubble effects.

After that, primer itself – white. WHITE? Yes, because we’re going leopard spotting!

Splodge on the thinned yellow… ooer, that doesn’t look right..

Splodge on the thinned brown craft paint.. that REALLY doesn’t look right!

Wash with very thinned down craft balck pint… OK, starting to see it now…

Drybrush with bone… Oh look, see, I knew that would happen all along. Just trust Uncle Dan, folks.

Here they are baby – flocked, sealed, varnished – they’re done!

And in situ during our recent 40k game…

There we are, a nice cheap & simple terrain hack – a bit small for 28mm in retrospect, but for Epic & 1/72 these should be fine, plus it’ll be nice to deploy them gradually to represent accumulated damage from air & artillery strikes.. and as we playtest our way through the Apocalypse: Earth 2nd edition rules, there’ll be a few of those! Particularly with the new guys joining the party….

So that’s a wrap then, stay thrifty and Slavia Ukrainia until next time.