Hot wire cutter from scraps

I had some left over styrofoam knocking about and was wondering about how long it is going to take to print my entire Kraken Studios Fantasy Football pitch (spoiler alert… a really long time!) and how a lot of the pitch-side “terrain” was made from bolted together planks of wood.

Now I’ve made loads of laser-cut mdf terrain in the past (including a fantasy football pitch-side stand and filled it full of converted Warhammer Orcs as my fans) and while it looked nice, it was always lacking that one thing – texture detail.

I hacked a thin strip off the styrofoam and drew on some woodgrain with a sharp pencil. A quick splash of brown craft paint, some (water-based) Quickshade Strong Tone and a drybrush of Coat D’Arms Skeleton Bone and it looked pretty good.

I also tried drawing a brick pattern onto another piece and already preferred it to my current “polyfilla applied through a mylar stencil” approach – even without painting it, I reckon this will be my go-to approach for brick buildings, simply because it was so quick and mess-free!

Now, sure, it looks a bit “cartoon-y” (especially the wood).

But I’ve been trying for a while to paint my miniatures and get away from the “cartoon-y” look and failed. I’ve just had to accept that’s how the paint comes out of my paintbrush. So instead of trying to fight it, I’m going to embrace it. Cartoony it is!

So this is where it all started.