The Hills of Iberia

As if painting a full Carthaginian force wasn't enough, I decided I needed some new terrain for the Iberian peninsula for the army to fight over. Now, I've done this sort of thing before for the North West Frontier but this time I wanted a redder/sandier finish so I decided to go from scratch rather repaint what I already had.

One of my students was building a project that contained lots of rings of MDF which meant I had lots of left over MDF circles. These were ideal for terrain bases and were about 250-300mm in diameter.

First thing to do was bulk out the basic shape with Expanded polystyrene blocks, roughly cut to shape and glued done hot met glue.

Then it was the turn of the cork bark. I got 2Kg from a seller on ebay which means I still have a load left over. I cut it down into chunks that were roughly equivalent in height to the layers of PS and hot glued them into place, carving out parts of the PS to get better fits.

To fill the gap between the PS and the Cork I used some expanding foam. I knew that I could trim it back fairly easily when it was cured so I wasn't too precious about it squirting out.

A bit of trimming down with a knife/saw and the foam was much more in control.

I then went back to the old favourite, Pine bark chips, and hot melt glued them over the rocky outcrops to add more detail and cover obvious gaps.

Now for the messy part. I sieved some sharp sand and mixed the fine sand with some quick drying polyfilla (spackle is what the septics call it) and plastered it all over the exposed PS areas and in the gaps between the rocky areas.

I started the colouring by spraying the outcrops in RED! Matt red car spray from Halfords. And then over the top I sprayed Khaki (Halfords Camouflage range). Already they are starting to look the part.

Once that was done it was to drybrushing. Mixing test pots of house paint to get increasingly sandy tones and then brushing aggressively all over. Once I had the colours I was happy with I went to my little drawer of tufts and liberally sprinkled then over the outcrops. A little bit of flock on the ground level to blend them in to the mat and they are all done.

 

And here they are being used down at the club last weekend. As well as Iberia, these would be useful in Mexico, the South of the US, and maybe even Italy. I'm pretty happy with them for a days work.