Sprue into Terrain: Lot's of gluing. Lot's of head scratching.

"I am a ridiculous man. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before." -- Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

I was cleaning up my hobby room and saw the mountains of empty sprues. I figured I could chop it up into straight lines and see what I should do with it. So I asked a friend....

I knew his advice was sensible.

But, do you know when you feel that tug inside you? A challenge that says, you can do it too, you can do it better... It's not logical. It's a must.

I started cutting the sprues into little bits.

Once you start cutting sprues, you get in a rhythm. and it's something you can do between jobs. Pretty soon I had a little wall going.

Apologies for the bad photo. I keep wondering why the terrain is being carried by a hurricanum, but it's just the box it's sitting on. Troll placed for size comparison.

At this point I was getting worried about it looking too much like sprue.

As ridiculous as I am, I opted to not shave off the words printed on the sprue. I used some bog* to fill in the gaps and cover up any writing.

*bog is another word for goop you can use to fill in holes.

I was worried about this notion that Sprue terrain looks like it's made of sprue. I wanted to make sure I had a good texture that worked. That it looked like real material. So I bogged in the section built and painted it for a mock up.

I'm using Mont Marte crackling medium. Not because it's any good or something I'd recommend. I ordered one bottle, and it didn't really work, so called them and they were super nice about sending 4 more bottles of these. LoL. 4 crappy bottles are better than 1. It doesn't crackle as fine as citadel's crackle basing, but I found it works well for large scale models.

The main issue I have with it is it keeps chipping off.

Do leave a comment if you have good suggestions for an alternative for gaming use.

Pretty happy how it came out, so I kept building. Now I wanted to make it really big.

In my head I was making a dirt fortress reinforced by wood. I just kept extending because bigger is better.

And then started creating a hole in the floor, like damage from cannon fire.

Starting to feel pretty good about the scale here. I added a bit more height and a little ladder at the bottom to finish up. I wanted to make sure there was a lot of flat areas to place models. You can see it will comfortably host a whole unit of infantry.

Added the bog again.

One of the tricks I used here was to use a really crappy brush, one that was ruined from PVA glue. I brushed the medium gently along the sprue longways to simulate wood grain.

Details on the crackle and texture after painting black.

Happy with the texture, Added some colour, with a healthy dose of dry brushing.

Added some tufts and flocking and done.

It's ridiculous to think about making sprue terrain. There's plenty of perfectly viable alternatives. Still, I love how this turned out. Except there's just one problem...

I need to do this 6 more times to fill a table. I'll continue the journey in my next blog....

To be continued.