Terrain

Terrain making is one of the most fun aspects of the hobby I think. You can easily grow bored with painting rank after rank of infantry or tanks. With terrain each piece is unique and usually large enough for you to be able to add all sorts of fun detail. It is important to remember that although the miniatures are the actual gaming pieces, the terrain is just as important. Boring terrain makes good minis look bad and also great terrain can really enhance the looks of a game with simply painted minis. It is well worth the extra effort to make your terrain look good: after all minis get killed and are removed from play but the terrain you will be looking at throughout the game.
There's plenty of articles on the net on how to do the most basic terrain such as a basic gaming board, hills, rivers etc. I won't go into much detail on how to construct these but simply give a few tips which I've found usefull. Instead I'll focus on some of the slightly more ambitious terrain projects which hopefully can give you a new idea or two as inspiration for your own projects.

The Basics:

You'll need all the basic tools used for normal modelling but in addition you'll probably find that some heavier equipment comes in handy. No worries though: Most of them can be found in your average toolbox so it shouldn't really be a problem. A saw, jigsaw and heavy clippers are the most commonly used items. To complete yourTerrain Toolbox the following specialist items can be usefull: Hot Glue Gun for quick fixation of larger objects. A hot wire cutter for cutting Polystyrene without making a mess. Rough brushes for texturing stuff and splattering on paint. Finally a water spray (your mom probably has one-otherwiise an empty wondow cleaner spray can be used) for spraying on glue for random flocking.
Let me say that the specialist items are buy no means strictly necessary. I don't use them but I can definitely see how they might come in handy every now and then.

The basic materials you should allways stock up on are cardboard, polystyrene, plasticard, various pipes and rods, sand, gravel and of course plenty of PVA glue. Other than that I can stress enough how you should never throw anything away! It is usually the most common cause of heated debate with the wife/girlfriend/mom, but a well stuffed Bitz box is worth it's own weight in gold and you can never have enough weird leftovers from radios, odd pieces of wood, packing material etc.

For ease of navigation here's a quick overview of the contents:

Simple Stuff:
Board
Hills
Woods
Rivers
Buildings

(Slightly more) Advanced terrain building
Using the E40k plastic ruins spures
Cityfight
Themed buildings

Simple stuff:

The Board:
The Terrain board can be done in several ways. There's lots of articles how to construct normal gaming tables and modular gaming b oards. Most of the techniques I describe later can be applied to any type of board. Personally I use a normal sanded board split in 3 pieces of 120x90 each. All my terrain is then placed on top of these which makes storage fairly easy

Hills:
Hills can be done in a number of ways. Usually it is just a matter of cutting a piece of Polystyrene into shape, sand or flock it and it's ready for action. The only consideration you really has to take into account is wrrther you want a hill with steep slopes but a nice flat plateau for placing miniatures or you prefer a more realistically looking hill. The problem with the latter is that miniatures have an annoying tendency of falling down when you play. Still if the slope is plain enough they can work just fine and it looks great.

Woods:
Woods present some of the same problems as hills: Do you want it to look realistically or do you want it practical for gaming. You also have to decide if you want individually based trees of entire forest sections.
Thirdly you have to decide what to use for the trees themselves. Personally I want my stuff to be a compromize between what looks good and what is practical. I've based my trees on small sections of woods. The advantage of using larger bases is, that the trees don't get knocked over very easily + it's easy to define when a unit is in cover: if it is on the base it's in cover, if it's outside it's not. Individual trees are more versitaile but you have to agrree with your opponent where the terrain borders are.
I use small Forest sections some 25x15 cm. It's better to make several small forest pieces rather than one again because of the versaitility.
Now you have to figure out how densely you want your trees planted. With the pricetag on model trees it's pretty expensive to make an entire realistically looking forrest. Alternaatively you can use coloured moss. It works from a distance but it doesn't look great. Another problem is that you can add so many trees that there's no room left for placing miniatures.
The solution I came up with was to plant a few model trees arround the edge of the base. In the middle I then added some moss. The nice part is that you can then remove the moss when you want to place miniatures in the terrain.

Woods look best with a brownish base colour. Vary it by sprinkeling some flock or static grass in various places. To avoid that it looks too bright you can tone down the colour of the flock with a bit of thinned down brown or black.
Add some bits of branchesm, stones and other stuff from the garden to make the base even more interesting.

Rivers:
It's difficlut to make a realictic looking river unless you are doing a modular terrain board. This is because a river or canal often "cuts" itself down in the surface. Obviously you can't do that on a table so you have to build river sections which are then placed on top of the board.
The simplest way to make rivers are to cut a MDF board to the desired length. Mine are 30x10 cm. Add some sand on the sides to represent the river banks. In the middle you then paint the river. Choose a colour which contrasts nicely with your board but also one which looks realistic. Very few rivers are actually blue! I made mine a rusty red colour.
Towards the banks you mix in some of the colour of your river banks to simulate that the waterlevel is lower and the bottom is showing through. Another thing to consider is that a narrow river tends to be deeper and flow faster. A wide river has a much wider bank of shallow water. Also consider which direction in which the river flows: This can affect how sand banks are shaped and lots of other stuff which adds to the realism of your river. Finish it of by painting the water a bright varnish.
You can make all sorts of variations to your river to make it more intersting. Just remember that the stuff should be practically usable. I've simply made a series of straight river sections with a few variations to the flow of the river. For curves I made these "Pizza slices" which can be added to produce curves.
For bridges you can make your own or simply use the ones from Model Railway stores. They look good and don't cost very much.

To make "real" Gothic architecture you should look at a few pics of Gothic cathedrals. Look at the way stuff like windows and columns are positioned. I find it easiest to build the colums and butresses from wood and then cut arches out of cardboard or plasticard. Circles can be a bit tricky so if you can find any circular objects to use for these it allmost allways look better than stuff cut by hand. Many of my Gothic buildings are based on the card buildings which came with Titan Legions. The basic shape were allready made and the architechture had been printed on the face of the card. Then it was a simple matter of building a shape more or less similar to the original artwork. Extra miniatures are allways great decoration where they can be used as statues, gargoyles and even pillars.

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