Craft Knife – I use some cheap large snap knives. A good source of these is Pound shops or Dollar stores.
Hot Glue Gun – A must have for any terrain maker. They’re cheap and you don’t have to wait around the way you do with PVA glue. These get extremely hot (the clue is in the name) so younger readers will need supervision.
PVA Glue – I use wood glue (my father is a joiner meaning I can siphon this off into a smaller PVA bottle...) which seems to dry quicker than regular PVA.
Pin Vice – This is optional (see later).
5 Arrange the branches on the base and glue the bottom ones onto the base using the hot glue gun.
6 Mark a number of points around the branches to show where you will need supports – these are basically stakes that would be driven into the ground in order to keep the stockade in place.
7 Place the top branches or twigs on top of the base branches; mark on a skewer the height of the stockade. Cut the required number of stakes using the clippers before trimming them with the craft knife.
8 Glue stakes into place using hot glue gun.
9 Glue the top branches or twigs in place using the hot glue gun.
10 I then used the pin vice in order to make the barricade look like it had taken some
fi re. For this I simply drilled into the wooden stockade in a number of places to show the bullet holes.
11 Now take some PVA glue mixed with a small amount of water and add texture to the base using the sand/gravel mix. You’re fi nished, congratulations. Repeat this process and you’ll have yourself a set of Stockades for use in a variety of tabletop wargames. You could also raid your bits box to add detail, e.g.
skeletons, weapons, discarded equipment etc to give it that lived in feel.
12 Undercoat and paint the stockade.
ANIMAL LAIR
The jungles of the universe are inhabited by many creatures – some big, some small. Many of the larger creatures choose to build nests or burrows. This guide will help you build one...
Materials
Branch – The branch used was a rather rotten piece of wood; but still solid enough to stay in one piece.
Plastic Foliage – The leaves I used here are taken from a section of plastic foliage which is normally used to add greenery to a bunch of false fl owers. The foliage was £1 from a department store for a rather large piece (I use them in the aquarium of my pet turtles) and if you shop around you should quite easily be able to fi nd something similar.
Twigs
Photo leaves MDF
Skeleton Pieces Sand and Gravel Mix Tools
Craft Knife, Clippers, Hot Glue Gun, PVA Glue, Superglue
Modeling: Jungle Terrain by Christopher Hird
Method
1 Take your chosen Branch and mark out a base. For this stratagem you will require up to 6 markers so smaller may be better.
2 Cut out the chosen base using a craft knife.
3 Trim the sides of the base to give it a slight slope, as per the ‘Stockade Step 3’ above.
4 Decide how you will arrange the branch on the base. Make sure that it is at a slight tilt leaving a gap that becomes the entrance to the creature’s lair. Glue the branch down using the hot glue gun.
5 Arrange the skeleton pieces around the entrance to the lair; these are the discarded leftovers from the animal’s snacks.
6 Add a few twigs to the base as you see fi t.
7 Drill a number of holes in the branch.
8 Insert the foliage into the holes and glue in place using some superglue.
9 Mix PVA glue with a little water and add texture to the base using the sand and gravel mix, but leave a blank spot around the base of the branch – this will be painted black to imitate a hole under the branch.
10 Undercoat and paint. The Animal Lair is now complete. For variation you could use tentacles from the Chaos Spawn sprue, or
make some using green stuff, and have them snaking out of the hole of the lair to snatch an unsuspecting jungle combatant.
JUNGLE OUTCROP
One of the most important terrain features on a jungle board is obviously the jungle itself.
There are a number of ways of creating jungle and I would suggest taking a good look around your local pet shops and department stores for cheap plastic plants. This tutorial uses a plastic foliage ‘spray’ in rather an unusual way.
Materials Plastic Foliage MDF
Twigs
Sand and Gravel Mix Tools
Craft Knife, Clippers, Hot Glue Gun, PVA Glue Method
1 Begin by marking the base that you require on the MDF. For this medium sized piece of terrain I chose a base of around 6 inches by 4 inches.
Modeling: Jungle Terrain by Christopher Hird
2 Cut out the base using a craft knife. Again use your own judgement or use a steel ruler.
3 Trim down the base edges so that they are on a little more natural slope. This will help them blend into the board better.
4 Take the plastic foliage and begin to remove the leaves – on my foliage they come off quite easily and can be replaced afterwards.
5 You will be left with an armature of thick wire covered in plastic, with parts that the leaves fi t onto. Begin to cut lengths of this wire – the tip of the branch is the best part to take.
6 When you have a handful of pieces cut you can begin to glue them to the base. Bend them at a right angle and glue onto the base using the hot glue gun as shown.
7 Some pieces of wire may be too thick to bend and glue, for these pieces I took half a twig which I drilled into before gluing the wire piece into the hole. It now looks like the branch is actually growing through the fallen and rotten tree.
8 When all the wires are attached to the base you can begin to put the foliage on. A number of these were glued onto the base itself, whilst the majority are just slotted back onto the nubs on the wire.
9 Add texture to the base using PVA mixed with a little water and the sand and gravel mix.
You could give more variety to this by using different types of foliage, adding extra twigs as fallen logs, adding rocks or anything else that strikes your fancy.
10 The piece of terrain can now be undercoated and painted.
Modeling: Jungle Terrain by Christopher Hird
KILLER FLORA
Jungles throughout the universe are filled with hidden dangers – many of these come in the form of carnivorous plant life. This is my attempt at making markers to represent the Killer Flora Stratagem, based on a plant that was mentioned in the back of the Catachan Codex – the ‘Spiker’. The idea behind this plant is that it fi res out spines coated in poison that contain the plants seed. The seeds then use the corpse of impaled on the spike as fertiliser, growing into another Spiker.
Materials
Pine Cones – I picked these up on a walk through my local wood. I thought that they’d work well and found some which fit on a standard 40k base comfortably.
Cocktail Sticks
Bases – I used normal 40k slotta bases.
Sand and Gravel Mix Tools
Clippers, hot glue gun, PVA glue, super glue Method
1 Begin by removing the stalks from the pine cones and cleaning them up – there may be some seeds to remove.
2 Glue the cone to a base using the hot glue gun, as shown.
3 Add the sand and gravel mix to the base using PVA glue thinned with water.
4 Cut spines from cocktail sticks to desired length.
5 Super glue the spines into the openings of the cone. It is best to dry fi t these before choosing where to glue them in.
6 Undercoat and paint as you see fi t! I made six of these, they were simple and cheap, using found materials, spare bases and other materials I already had.
See the next page for fi nished projects.
Modeling: Jungle Terrain by Christopher Hird
Modeling: Jungle Terrain by Christopher Hird
By Tepok
I got this idea when I remembered an old White Dwarf article where they made trees using masking tape wrapped around a wire frame. I decided to use that as my base idea, but replacing the masking tape with dressing (bandages) and adding pencils to the wire frame (more on pencils later).
What I used:
• Dressing
• Aquarium leaves / plants
• Thin garden wire
• Pencils
• Flock
• Some sort of base
• PVA
• Super glue
I started by cutting a pencil in half, and wrapping the wire around it. This needs to be quite rough, if the wire was even it would have looked unnatural (I just tried to keep an average thickness).
The next step is sorting out the ‘bark’ for the tree. I cut a piece of dressing that is the same length as the pencil and long enough so that it could wrap around at least twice.
Once you’re happy with the length and width get some super glue and attach the dressing to the tree. Start wrapping the dressing around ensuring that you’ve got a tight fi t.
Wrap up that end as well. Make sure that the end of the dressing isn’t straight, as otherwise the tree will look too unnatural. Add super glue around both ends of the pencil.
Modeling: Jungle Trees