Painting GW Terrain

I thought it might be helpful to go through exactly how I did my GW hill and craters. I followed the same general process with each, which was basically the same process suggested by the packaging of the terrain painting kit.

Step 1: Use a 2" brush to cover the entire piece in dark brown. I used the dark brown that came with the terrain painting kit, but in the future will probably switch to a slightly lighter chocolate brown craft paint I found.

Step 2: Also using a 2" brush, drybrush ochre yellow onto the areas that aren't going to be covered with static grass. How heavy a drybrush you use here is just a matter of taste. I did lighter on the hill and a heavier drybrush on the craters. Again, I used the paint that came in the terrain painting kit, but found an ochre yellow craft paint that looks to be nearly a match that I plan on trying in the future.

Step 3: Mix up a roughly 50/50 mix of pva glue/water and paint it over the areas you want to apply the static grass. I used an old GW tank brush for this purpose as I needed a bit better control for this stage in order to avoid getting static grass where I didn't want it. I used two shades of static grass, starting with spots of one by just grabbing a handful and dropping it on the spots I thought looked good, then turning over the terrain and letting the excess fall off onto a piece of newspaper, repeating this until I had the coverage I wanted. I followed by doing the same thing with the second shade, but over a different piece of newspaper so that I could recover the excess grass and keep the shades mostly separate. Once I had the coverage I wanted, I blew lightly over the entire area to help cause the grass to settle into a more upright position.

With the hill, I covered up significant portions of the hill, roughly as shown in the pictures on the box, leaving only the vertical signs, and some other small areas showing. With the craters I only covered up the flat edge to help it blend in to the table.

I followed the GW recommendations of putting spots of the regular grass followed by filling up the rest of the area with scorched grass. I did this with the idea that I'm eventually going to do a complete table in the same manner; however, if you're planning to use the terrain with a standard green flocked mat, such as those made by GW or Monday Knight Productions, then you should probably reverse the ratio, doing spots of scorched grass followed by filling up the rest of the area with regular green grass in order to better match the game mat.

Step 4: Seal it up. I ended up using a couple coats of matte finish. The first was a cheap Krylon matte spray I'd been meaning to experiment with for a while, and when that didn't provide as matte a finish as I'd hoped for, I did a second coat using GW matte.

That's it. Doing the hill and a package of moonscape craters took me about five days from start to finish, but I only actually worked on them for somewhere around three hours total, with the rest of the time just being time between steps for things to dry, or simply having to wait while doing such unimportant things as work and sleep. If I could have cut things down to just waiting for things to dry, then I probably could have gotten them all done in a single day.