Hand-made Hills





Making Hills Introduction
Tired of the expensive or bad looking hills from Games Workshop? Make your own! I will explain to you how to create a good-looking hill with the only costs of the polystyrene, sand, rocks and some cheap paint.

…Good Luck…

Materials

You will be needing all these materials, if you wouldn’t use one of those, the whole hill will look worse.

Materials
1” high polystyrene (= height of the hill)
Knife
Hot wire cutter
A drawing device (pencil, pen)
Chaos Black spray paint
Modelling sand
Static Grass
Small rocks
PVA glue/wood glue



You are going to need a lot of paint for this hill so I wouldn’t use the most expensive paints you got. I do have some paint names in this list who are between ‘(‘ and ‘)’. Those are used for drybrushing this hill.

paints

Black paint
Brown paint
Grey paint
(Fortress Grey)
(Bestial Brown)
(Bleached Bone)
(Graveyard Earth)

Start: shaping the hill

Grab your drawing device and draw on the polystyrene how you want your hill to look like:



Use the Hot Wire Cutter to ‘cut’ the shape out of the polystyrene.

Place the shape of the hill back on a bigger piece of polystyrene and draw on the bigger piece of polystyrene the shape of the hill.
We now have a 3D shape of the hill and the surface of the 2D hill.
Again, grab your drawing device and draw on the shape of the hill in the polystyrene a smaller shape (which is similar to the bigger shape).
Cut the smaller shape out of the polystyrene with your Hot Wire Cutter.

Glue the smaller hill on the bigger hill. Somewhere around the middle of the bigger hill is okay but it’s up to you.



Creating the cliff and rocks

Now it’s finally time to start shaping the hill for real.
Grab your knife (I used a penknife) and push it in the polystyrene somewhere around the edges of the hill (see picture below).

Push the knife down and you will hear a cracking annoying sound of polystyrene being ripped.

You are stronger then the polystyrene (I hope) and so the small bit of polystyrene gets loose of the rest and a new shape of it appeared.





Keep doing this around the whole hill. You can also form a path up like seen on the picture below or make a ravine/bigger cliff down also seen on the picture below.





flat surfaces + modelling sand

If you have some flat surfaces, don’t worry. Grab your bottle of PVA glue/wood glue and ‘paint’ the glue on the surfaces that are still flat with a brush.

Scatter some Modelling Sand over the places where the glue is on and wait for the glue to dry.



Rocks

The glue has dried up and the Modelling Sand is now stuck to the hill. It’s time for some small rocks.
At the feet of the cliffs, paint with a brush some PVA glue/wood glue. Scatter some small rocks (found at most hobby stores) on the glue.

You can also make some rock piles on other places but again that is optional.



Painting the hill

It’s time to paint the hill. I recommend you use cheap paints for this because you are going to need a lot of paint.
Start off by painting the hill black. The whole hill must be black.



Wait atleast 2 hours for the paint to dry.

The cliffs

When the paint has dried up, grab a very big brush and heavily drybrush the cliffs with grey paint.



Drybrush the cliffs with Fortress grey. You don’t need much grey paint here.



Sand and small rocks

Wait for the grey paint to dry. When it has finally dried up, paint the sand areas and the small rocks with brown paint.



Time for drybrushing again. Drybrush all the brown areas with Bestial Brown.



After the Bestial Brown, drybrush the brown places with Graveyard Earth.
Wait for about 10 minutes before continueing with drybrushing the whole hill with Bleached Bone.
Drybrush the cliffs and the sand; everything with Bleached Bone!



Making the hill alive

‘Paint’ on several places spots of PVA glue/wood glue and scatter Static Grass over it.



Optional: Bushes
Glue small bushes on several places on the hill to make it even more realistic.

Conclusion

In no-time a well constructed and painted hill. Ready to be used for over a 1000 battles and ready to swallow the blood of elves, goblins, orcs, humans, uruk-hai, dwarfs and of even fouler creatures.

I hope you liked this article and it will provide you with useful information.
You can make all sized hills with this technique and even mountains with a height of over 6 times this small hill!