Quick and easy terrain

It's funny what can be inspiring sometimes. For most people (myself included), seeing a well painted or converted model can inspire them to make something similar, or perhaps a particularly nice piece of terrain might spark off an idea for a project. This time though, something mediocre has inspired me to make something better.

If you've been around any Facebook hobby groups over the weekend, you'll have probably seen the pictures coming from the London Grand Tournament. If you haven't then I won't go over it in detail here, but the main take from the weekend was that the terrain was really bad. Like, really terrible.

Watching the uproar about the whole thing got me thinking. Terrain building has become something of a lost art. Between the GW terrain kits and the sheer volume of smaller terrain makers that are out there, we're a little spoilt for choice these days when it comes to pre-made kits, but when I got into the hobby in the early 2000's if you wanted terrain at all, you had build it yourself!

The problem is that a lot of people don't even consider the option of making their own terrain these day. Most people either buy the premade stuff or don't bother at all, just focussing on their armies. I'm pretty much guilty of the same thing. I've got at least 5 large armies for various systems knocking about my flat, but very little terrain.

So I decided to spend an evening upgrading my terrain collection.

Being something of a magpie, I've got a box full of interesting and useful bits which I've saved with the intention to turn it into terrain. This includes everything from coffee tubs to coasters, along with various scraps from kits I've built and other junk. I'm sorry to say that until now I've hardly touched it, but hope that'll change over the next few weeks.

After diving in and a few minutes messing about and I had myself a couple of basic silos made:

They were literally made by gluing a couple of tubs to some coasters and basing them like I would any other model.

They were looking a little scrappy, but a quick spray of paint later and they were shaping up pretty nicely:

Whilst I was there I also sprayed up some bits and pieces I built last year and forgot to come back to:

Not a bad collection for perhaps an hour's work at most. Obviously I need to jazz them up a bit, but even at this stage they're certainly passable. I'm going to probably spend a day or two over the weekend going over them with washes and adding some details.

I think I've proved my point though. Making terrain needn't be difficult or expensive. You just have to be a little creative with junk and you can have a workable terrain set very easily.

I'm probably also going to make some more this week if I get time. Me and a mate want to play some more Necromunda soon, so upping my terrain count seems like a good idea.