Slaying Dusty Boxes

I mentioned in the description of the project that I previously made terrain for Slain: Kiss My Axe! while my minis sat unpainted for an excessive amount of time.  I figure it’d be worth while sharing what I finished before jumping into the rest of the project.

Slaine inspired me to jump into terrain building due to me mostly owning SciFi terrain and a limited amount of terrain for Bolt Action.  The plus side to Slaine terrain is that it would be useful for lots of different systems.

I decided that I wanted to pick up an additional Celtic Round House from Warlord Games, made by Sarissa Precision, before I started my terrain project.  Once it arrived I jumped into the project.

I decided to make the roofs of the round house using directions that came with the kit.  I did a little research and thought using Green Kitchen Scrub Pads from the Dollar Tree (where everything is sold for $1.25) would be a fun project.

After purchasing the materials, I traced out the roof, cut, and re-cut…and re-cut.  My ability to measure and cut things seems to have disappeared after elementary school.  After multiple attempts I finally had a proper design for the roofs and used a hot glue gun to secure them.

Using the hot glue gun resulted in an unnatural line on the roof.  I decided to use some white glue over these spots and grab a container of flock to shake onto the roof.  I think it turned out well enough.

I knew that I needed some additional scatter terrain and decided to make some hedges.  I consider myself a thrifty person, some might call me cheap, but I decided to use some leftover scrub pad material to make the hedges.  I thought they’d be great for Slaine and Bolt Action.

I cut some wavy strips from the scrub pads using a Bolt Action mini to get the right height for the hedge.  I used white glue to secure the hedge to a popsicle stick…and then the stick warped.

I decided to prime the popsicle sticks and tried gluing the hedge down again…and it warped again.  Reflecting back on this experience, perhaps this had something to do with the Warped Slaine figure sitting unpainted in the box.

I finally used my hot glue gun and the hedges were secure.  I added a little bit of paint and flock to the hedges.  I wasn’t going to put much more effort into them and decided they were good enough for my table.

I think every gamer needs trees and I didn’t have any in my collection.  I decided to order some tree kits produced by Woodland Scenics.  They have some great tutorial videos on YouTube.  After painting up the trees, a mix of brown and grey trunks, it was time to get the foliage on.

For some reason I decided to be thrifty (cheap) again and tried using white glue I had at home to secure the foliage to the trees.  Not surprisingly this didn’t work, even after the tutorial on YouTube shared the type of glue to use.

I’m sure you’re thinking by now that I learned my lesson.  Ha, no way in hell did that happen.  I decided that I’d buy a different type of white glue…that didn’t work.  Then I went back to the store and bought a brush on glue…that didn’t work.  At this point I realized that I should just go ahead and buy the more expensive Woodland Scenics glue for this project.

The glue arrived, I used it, and it worked…

Lesson learned for this project, but I’m sure my thrifty mindset will come back to bite me in the future.

To finish up the project, I painted up the tree bases (large washers) and added some flock.  I sprayed the trees multiple times with watered down white glue and I was finally finished with these frikin trees.

Like many miniature wargamers, I decided it would be a great idea to leave the rest of the Slaine minis in the box for about 2 years. Then I decided to finally start the project back up last week.