4. Give your foam a nice coat of watered down filler/spackle/plaster applied with a big paintbrush. The best way that I can describe the consistency would be too thick for paint and too wet for plaster. DO NOT try and get it smooth, the lines left behind by the paintbrush will pick up your last stages of drybrushing later on and make you look like an awesome painter to the uninitiated.
5. Now it's time to bulk out the base, ruins are usually going to be reasonably ancient so the surrounding area is unlikely to be flat. If however you are attempting a larger piece with lots of base area on which you wish to place miniatures then you may want to skip this step. I use a backing coat plaster called Bonding purely because it's quite lightweight and my terrain gets posted, but you can use the same medium as you used in the last step as long as you make it stiff enough to hold it's own shape.
6. Once dry, cover as much ground area as you like with pva glue and pour over some mixed grade sand(such as sharp sand) and allow to dry.
7. Time to undercoat, I chose a dark grey for this piece but you can use what ever colour you like. Try and use a darker shade though as this makes drybrushing far more effective.
8. Using a couple of consecutively lighter shades, give your terrain a good ol' fashioned drybrushing. The final brush can be a very dry white if you trust your hand-brush co-ordination.
9. Once your're happy with the paintjob, it's time to add a little static grass or flock. I've learned the hard way that less is generally better than more so dab on a few patches of pva and cover in the grass of your choice.
and there you have it, hopefully your ruins will look something like this or even better. This was the 1st type of terrain that I made and with each piece I just attempted something slightly different, here are a few I painted up with this one. I hope you liked my 1st ever tutorial and good luck with your modelling.
Any questions or comments, you know what to do.
