Making Hills from Expanding Foam

I started making these hills about a month ago. It’s one of those little projects you can do a little bit of work on, put aside and resume whenever you get a bit of time.

The hills are made from that expanding foam you inject behind bricks to get some insulation. I bought a can of Soudal Gap Filling Expanding Foam from the Range last time I was over there. It cost about £7 but I have since found some in one of my local stores for a couple of quid cheaper. So far I’ve made about 21 individual hills and I still have some left in the can.

My method for making the hills is as follows;

1. Squirt some foam onto a piece of grease-proof paper. Make sure you leave sufficient space between them as they expand over the next hour, like dough rising
2. Sand off the bottom of the blob of foam to make a flat bottom for gluing to a base
3. Cut the blob into some kind of recognisable hill with some flat areas for figures to stand
4. Glue the hill to a base. In my case I chose cork tile.
5. Coat the hill in filler.This fills in all the air bubbles and provides a key for the paint.
6. Add small rocks to the hill and the base. I use pieces of cat litter for this.
7. Glue sand to the base to match all my other terrain.
8. Paint the hill. So I give it a base coat, then a  wash, then a highlight of base-coat, lighter highlight and a white highlight.
9. Add some extras such as flock, lichen and grass tufts

et voila!

You can see my YouTube video of the finished item below;