Terrain boards - 03

Today? Bark.

Sorry. Of course I don't mean that bark. Rather, I mean the use of cork bark as rocks in terrain building. Because the free rocks in my garden don't look enough like rock. Apparently... No, tradition insists I hold back on making 28mm cliffs until a parcel (with a clipart lizard jauntily emblazoned across it) arrive suggesting a sudden enthusiasm for the comfortable sleeping of my non-existent gecko...

And who am I to argue with tradition?

First up, the view from above the river. I cut two inch high sections of cork bark (goodness me, but that stuff produces dust when it is cut) and hot-glued them to the vertical hill face, icing over the join with filler (spackle?) to smooth it over and set it visually in place.

From the side you can see how I followed the contour of the hill, dropping away to match the slope. There's also plenty of blue visible, but I'll come back to that later.

I decided to have a small outcrop of exposed rock on the back as well. Partly because I'd had enough slope creation, and partly because it reminded me of a hillside I used to play on as a kid in the Peak District.

And from the other side. I tried to make sure the cliff ran continuously across the join between the two boards, and I'm pretty pleased with that.

You can see where the join is with the two boards moved slightly apart. Scalpel for scale! The paler bits of "rock" are cork talus which I glued in to patch the gaps between larger pieces of bark, and I've started to smooth the join at the base of the cliff in this picture as well. I repeated that process the whole way round the cliffs.

A sudden pang of game-ability concern struck me at this point, so I grabbed some figures to see if they'd stand on the slopes. First to hand were some dwarfs; they'd know all about hills 'n' stuff, right?

Phew! Dwarf approved.

Till next time,

Rab