Terrain Project Part 2 – Adding the Hill

Now, any good terrain just has to have hills and just like the Games Workshop Realm of Battle Gameboard we wanted them as well! Taking the same modular approach we also decided on having one big hill spread across 4 of the board squares and the material of choice just had to be polystyrene. To be honest, that's mainly because I couldn't get any foam-board!

Polystyrene is fairly difficult to work on without a hot wire cutter, as well as being really messy. I don't have a hot wire cutter (and yes, I did go out and try to buy one!) but I do have an old, cheap soldering iron. It's one of those soldering irons that uses a metal loop between two points on the hand grip and an electrical current passes through the wire to generate the heat. By stripping a length of electrical cable to get at the copper wire and replacing the original soldering iron element with my new, really long one I had a makeshift wire cutter! What's more, it actually worked (you can see it in the first image).

The rest was pretty much plain sailing and I happily carved out a hill:

That's about it for now, though there is still the problem of carving that hill in to four pieces, one for each section of the base. As you can see, we created a nicely sloping section to the hill and topped it with a much more steep inclined section - ideal for gun emplacements to hang out on!