Tutorial: Swamps & Craters
Swamps and Ponds
Swamps are a little easier than craters, so we'll begin with a simple wetland.
For both of these projects, we'll use a CD. Remember those? They're basically useless now, so let's give them a new life.
Using a magic marker, we'll sketch in the basic outline of the swamp we want to create. This outline will be the water's edge, so leave plenty of space between the edges and the inside of this outline.
We need to cover the hole in the center. Easy fix: just tape a bit of card over the hole.
If you want the water to be very clear, you'll need to cover up the entire CD and then trace the swamp outline -- otherwise, you'll be able to see the edges of what you used to fill in the hole!
Caulk is perfect to give a more natural 'mud' effect.
A word of caution: be careful which type of caulk you select. Some types are considered hazardous to handle with bare skin, so you'll want to make sure you get a tube that isn't toxic or be sure to carefully apply it with tools rather than a fingertip. There's also no need to buy a lot; one tube will last you for all the craters, swamps, or rivers you'll ever want to make.
Follow the outline you drew, then smooth out the edges on the outside, but leave the inside so there's a small ledge.
Set this aside to dry overnight.
Adding a few stumps is a simple and easy way to turn a pond into a marsh.
Pick some dry twigs from your yard or local park. Make sure you gather ones that have smaller branches sprouting off of them. You may want to bake them in an oven at a low heat for 30 minutes to get rid of any bugs or scum and dry them out.
Snap off the tiny sub-branches, then saw the twigs in half right along the thick portions where the smaller branches were attached. Dry twigs are easy to cut and with only a few minutes work, you should have a half dozen stumps ready.
Glue a few of these in the water next to the shore as well as on the shore before you texture the base.
Next we'll want to add some texture.
This is pretty straight forward -- use an old brush and paint wood glue all over the ground areas, then sprinkle sand on it.
You may want to consider a texture where the 'water' will be. I used a Liquitex texture gel, but this is optional.
After all texturing is done and fully dry, we prime and paint the entire piece just as we would with a miniature. I chose to paint my water in shades of blue just for cartoon value, but in real life swamps tend to be brown, green, or even black rather than blue.
A swamp of course should be filled up with plants and grass like in my vegetation tutorial.
Once the piece has been suitably covered in greenery, use a small amount of Envirotex Lite or UV resin to create a realistic water effect. Be careful if your terrain's slopes aren't very high, as clear epoxies have a tendency to creep over edges if you use too much. Less is more -- you can always add another layer if it's too shallow, but you can't remove a layer if you've added too much and made it seep over the edges.
And that's all it takes for a swamp!
Craters
Again we begin with an old CD, but this time we'll make the inside of the terrain appear deeper and use some slightly different methods to build it all.
Craters are distinguished by deep, circular impressions, with lots of strewn debris and rocks scattered all around them. To replicate this, we'll need to make our interior ridges more obvious than what a thick line of caulk can achieve. We'll use another common item from the household: cardboard toilet tubes.
A single tube can provide all the crater rims we'll need. In the sample photo, I've left one at normal size but clipped the other rings so that I could contract one and expand the other. Whatever pattern of cratering you want, it's pretty easy to snip and tape the cardboard rings into place.
After deciding on placement, affix the rings with a glue gun. If you don't have a glue gun, go out and buy one at Micheals or WalMart now -- it's far, far too handy not to have one of these if you're going to be doing a lot of modeling.
We can also use the glue gun to do some preliminary bulking up of the crater. As with the swamp, focus on bulking up the exterior ridges into slopes while leaving the interiors as vertical as possible. This is especially important for craters to maintain that illusion of depth.
For a bit of variety, I also added some smaller rings on the outside slopes as the results of secondary explosions and assorted depressions.
Now the crazy fun part! Use the glue gun to mount randomly sized rocks and broken bits of cork all over the terrain. Primarily focus on building up the exterior ridges and don't worry if bits overhang the craters. When gaps appear that a rock or cork bit won't fill properly, don't be scared to fill them with a blob of hot glue instead. If the cardboard ridges are standing out too tall from the rock mass you're building up, just snip them down to a more appropriate size and shape with scissors.
Feel free to add interesting tidbits that you want to appear half-buried. A rusted vehicle chassis, shattered reinforced walls, battered armour plates, skulls, or bodies are all exciting and fun things to add to the craters, and you should really only be limited by your imagination and terrain preferences.
After you've built up a good base of rubble, it's time to add the sand. To further secure the crater slopes, mix two-parts white glue with one-part sand into a gloppy cement and apply it in any remaining gaps. The purpose of this is to make the bottom of each crater convex, so you can skip this if you want your minis to stand flat inside.
In addition to cementing the bottom of the craters themselves, cover everything else with white glue and add sand just as you would with any base.
Once everything is dry, prime the piece with black. Why black and not white? For miniatures I almost always use white primer for brighter shades. Brighter shades are less important for terrain since it's a backdrop for the miniatures and is often painted in dark shades anyway (browns, dark greys, blacks, deep blues, etc). Plus giving a large piece of terrain extra coats of your base colour just to get everything covered is not fun! Black in the recesses of a terrain piece is a also lot more forgiving than seeing tiny specks of white.
Hopefully I've demonstrated in this tutorial that two completely different types of terrain can be created using very similar techinques. If you don't believe me, try making a swamp using the crater methods and compare it to the finished crater terrain! The differences are primarily one of colour and what dressings you add, but both can be quite convincing on the tabletop.