Roads Tutorial and Woods

While I was waiting for my 6mm models to arrive I put my time to good use making some 6mm scale terrain. This was very important because my terrain collection is all 40K based and completely out of scale for the tiny miniatures I am determined to employ. First up I made some trees:

These were done using foamcore for the bases, home-made twisted wire armatures, Woodland Scenics clump foliage for the leaves, Citadel static grass to cover the bases and Woodland Scenics bushes and underbrush for the underbrush. I am particularly pleased with how they turned out and will do a detailed tutorial in full course.

The other thing I made was a set of roads. These were a bit of an experiment and I could improve on them for next time, but I am still very happy with them. I used foamcore for the road itself, cut to shape 20mm wide and sanded into a mound. This forms the actual road. I then based the roads on 1.5mm thick balsa wood. The roads were covered in sand glued on with PVA and set aside to dry. Once the excess material had been shaken off I undercoated everything with Citadel Black Spray Undercoat. Make sure you blu-tak the individual pieces down or they will be blown away by the spray - they are very light.

I base coated them in artist's paint ("Raw Umber" is the colour, something like GW's Scorched Brown) thinned down with 2 parts paint to 1 part water. Once this was thoroughly dry I drybrushed the roads with Graveyard Earth, then Bleached Bone and finally Skull White. I glued flock along the sides of the road and voilà! 6mm scale roads.

John of course immediately pointed out that I needed a crossroads (damn!) and I will knock one up shortly. Overall I have made about 3 linear metres of road which should be enough to start with. As I said they are quite light but they are very flexible - I was able to twist out any warping due to drying glue.

For next time I will pay closer attention to the width of the bases; while the roads all line up nicely the bases don't. It won't matter much once they are on a flocked gaming mat but it is definitely scope for improvement.

So there we go, trees and roads!