Coral Reef Underwater Terrain Board

Any good terrain board needs plenty of scatter terrain, which in this case meant some coral reef elements, rocks, and sea plants.  To accomplish this, I used some premade elements, converted and repurposed some other pieces, and scratch-built the rest.

These were some really cheap resin decorative garden elements from the dollar store. The two that are coral bits work fine, I can just stick those anywhere, I wouldn’t even need to modify them, really.  But what am I going to do with a pail of sand with a shovel and some seashells?

Rather than just throw it away, I realized that the top part works fine with the shell and starfish sticking out of the sand pile.  So I just used cheap plumber’s putty from the hardware store (“Fix-It Stick” by Oatey,) to build up a pile around the base, covering up the plastic beach pail.  Then I stuck some dollar store wooden beads into the base, and used glue gun to texture the outside.  I textured the putty and voila: the first bit of scatter is done.

I also wanted some polyps or tube worms as well.  I used more putty for the base and more beads for the tubes.  But for the frilly fronds I used a dollar store product I don’t normally think of:

These fake eyelashes were perfect, and they were already adhesive!  I stuck them to the end of a toothpick with an extra dab or hot glue and stuck them in the end of the beads.

Cutting each lash in half gave me four worms in tubes.  I then suck them all in a putty base, for another scatter piece sorted.

This next one would be a bit bigger.  I had these funky pasta shapes that I thought would look great as coral structures.  I stuck these in the middle of a long shape of putty, and I stuck one of the resin coral pieces in as well.  For the other end, I carved it to look like a piece of brain coral.