Woodland / Grassland Hills

 I consider hills to be one of the cornerstones of the tabletop.  Whenever I build a new table, these are one of the first things I count for terrain.  Of course, I'm old school so these hills are 'free-placed' rather than built into any tabletop.  Modular hills - they are ubiquitous, and every table needs some modular hills.

Continuing with the motif of updating the hills from the old club.  Obviously, these were concerned with functionality over aesthetics.  All of these were cut from standard styrofoam, probably cribbed from packaging.  They were then treated like I normally do them - covered in pva to create a hard shell and then spraypainted.  This makes them very sturdy - the big one on the bottom right is almost 25 years old.

The edge-old dilemma of storing these kind of hills is the 'chipping' that will occur as they are tossed around over the decades.  Every time I redo these, this is the #1 thing that must be fixed every single time.  Luckily, I ran across a method I would have never thought of to fix this - or at least heavily mitigate it.

And thus I found - the wet toilet paper method.

The idea apparently is used quite a bit across the terrain-o-sphere, but I got the idea to use it here at the edges of my chipping styro-hills because of the apparent strength granted.  The methodology is simple:  using watered-down PVA glue, you apply a rim of 'wet' toilet paper and let it dry.  This not only hardens the edges of the styrofoam, but also can be spray-painted.

Make sure to get up under there.  Don't worry - it dries flat.  The reason you can see under the rims in some of the pics is because of my tables slight warpage in the center.  

Hey, it's old too.

Once they were dried, I painted them up with some acrylic.

I almost called it done here.  

Yet, I decided to go ahead and apply some flock before I took pics of the table in my dimly lit dungeon.

There's a special mix of flocking material including sand and talus, but it's mostly different colored flocks.

So yeah...I should probably replace my tables or build a new one.  That bend in the middle really grinds my gears, but oh well.  Maybe I should just resurface it.