FINISHING THE FLORA

I have these two cans of "textured" spray that i bought to experiment with so i decided to use them to coat these pieces. As it turns out the black was fine but the brown was almost red. 

With that disapointment to deal with i decided to re coat black and then rely on the basecoat of paint, which truthfully i was hoping to avoid needing. 

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Lockdown has meant that i have to egt all the supplies i usualy get from different places in town (for a pittance) online instead, and spending ten to fifteen times more most of the time. I refused to risk buying burnt umber in bulk online (my main basing brown) and so i got one from wilko, sadly i had the exact same problem as the brown spray, this was also red, like martian earth. I decided to run with it. 

​It didn't dry any better, so i needed to work it in a bit with other browns. 

Using some craft paint i half drybrushed / half smudged orange, yellow, earthy brown and a much darker brown onto them. Now they're starting to look good. I also made sure to limit my effort on the drybrushing as i wanted to leave all the colors underneath and also the black where it still showed. As i want these to be convention friendly terrain they really need to have high contrast colors, it will also look beautiful in the book with multi colored earth tones muting out all the bright greens. 

Further into the adventure for contrast i painted some yellow, greay and light grey stones. I made sure the two grey tones where quite apart and i picked out some big ones and some small ones on each piece. I found that it looked best when i picked out a big one then maybe two of three around it in the same color, this gave a nice look as though bits of stone had erroded over time. 

The last thing i did was to sue a large brush and lightly dry brush the whole lot with beige (i used a tester paint pot from wilko but any beige would do). I was very sparing then as and when i could see darker patches that seemed uneven i would dab a bit more one. The big stones especially got attention and it really makes them pop out at you. 

For flocking i chose a spring/summer mix from ebay i got a while back and i also put sprigs of silflor flowers and tufts around the pieces. This final touch really brings it all together and something about them at this point just reminds me of the old flat hills you'd get in photographs in the lord of the rings magzines i collected as a child. Just bumpy and cool looking. I should say the yellow isn't quite so yelloe in real life, it looks very similar but the brown levels in the yellow i chose are just enough. These pieces would work just as well with three tones of grey or more tones of brown. 

Something that always amused me baout terrain making is that between the laborious processes and drying times you can often spend days (literal days) doing some part of a job, then suddenly you get to the end, plonk on a bunch of details and BAM, it's just done. This was one of those cases. 

To place the plants i would rip them by hand from their plastic branch and clump two or three together tightly then inserting them into the holes i drilled before while putting a dab of super glue in the hole to. 

My hands got covered but the result is SO clean and so lovely and there isnt a big ugly blob of hot glue in sight! For the bigger bases i made sure to clump larger concentrations of plants in the middle so that we could really have some seriously thick obscurring cover. 

The result is simply and absolutley beautiful, and because of the meticulous construction they almsot actually look alive, they'd certainly be super suitable looking inside of a natural vivarium. 

I took a few set up shots on the battle mat (i didn't really set them up but if i took my time can you imagine, with lighting and a smoke machine and oh my gosh i just have so many ideas.) I hope you enjoyed this little two part tutorial and that it inspires you to get creating. I obviously had the tools for this to start but you could do something similar with poster board for so affordably.
Please send in your own dino flora for us to post and share your creations! We are using the email of our sister company EZPainter right now so send emails to contact@ezpainter.co.uk