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;
- 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
- Sand off the bottom of the blob of foam to make a flat bottom for gluing to a base
- Cut the blob into some kind of recognisable hill with some flat areas for figures to stand
- Glue the hill to a base. In my case I chose cork tile.
- Coat the hill in filler.This fills in all the air bubbles and provides a key for the paint.
- Add small rocks to the hill and the base. I use pieces of cat litter for this.
- Glue sand to the base to match all my other terrain.
- 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.
- Add some extras such as flock, lichen and grass tufts
et voila!
You can see my YouTube video of the finished item below;
