Howto - building a terraced hillside for the Mediterranean

I posted up some reference photos a few days ago as inspiration for a terrain piece that I had had in my mind for quite a while now: a terraced hillside.  

Hills (badly done!) on a wargaming table have long been a pet peeve of mine. Many tabletop terrain slopes are either too steep to perch a miniature on or just look unrealistic.  Building well-proportioned hill terrain, but still suitable for gaming on, is one of the trickiest things to pull off, IMHO. I think that I have discovered the solution...terraced hills!

Terraced hills have been employed by farmers all around the world through the ages, but are common in many parts of the Mediterranean as way of turning unusable land into being suitable for agriculture. The steepest hills, with terraces cut into them and buttressed with retaining walls, become productive land for vines, fruit trees or other crops. It also means that you can place minis on the hillsides without them falling off/down and they look real. You be the judge!

Materials

• High density roofing insulation board (or something similar)
• Cheap polyfilla or similar; I bought a big bucket of super cheap, low quality wall filler
• PVA glue
• Cat litter
• Paint for the stone walls; I used some small pots that 4Ground used to produce, but any sort of acrylic or DIY-store paint will probably suffice
• Sand
• Coloured tile grout
• Flock, clump, scatter,  etc

Tools

• A large saw
• A spatula or something to spread the wall filler
• A spray bottle
• Paint brush

Technique

I cheated slightly at the start of this project by recycling a large hill from my winter table (you can see it in photos of this battle report) and used that as the base for the whole terrain piece. 

If I hadn't up-cycled the foam hill, I would have started off with a block a bit like the bit below, which is approximately four inches thick. I peeled off the silver foil and then cut it into a rough oval shape (the outline of the hill) using my wood saw.  Wear some gloves and a mask if you are cutting this stuff up - it's not the sort of dust that you want to ingest or inhale.

Then, I cut chunks of the square edges off using the full length of the saw cutting into the foam starting off at a 45 degree angle, then a shallow angle, then shallower again. The idea is that you cut the squareness off the block and create shallow slopes from the base up to the peak.  You should be able to see what I mean by looking at the green parts of the hill in the photo below i.e. before I started cutting the terraces into it.

Using the saw again, I cut into the hillside, level with the base, to create the "floor" of the terraces, then cut downwards to create the "walls" of each terrace.

I sealed all the bare foam with the cheap wall filler and left it to dry for a few hours.

Don't be too concerned about making it look that tidy. It gets completely covered in other materials later on.

One thing that I learnt during this project is that cheap, low quality wall filler shrinks when it dries, which caused the foam insulation to warp. Who knew? ;-(  I think I will go back and rebase the whole terrain piece on something that has a nice, flat base.

The next step is to apply the walls, which are made of cat litter and plenty of PVA glue. I have written a separate tutorial on how I create my rough-looking Mediterranean stone walls, so I won't repeat the how-to here.  Here are some photos of the work-in-progress though.

Once the walls have dried (lots of diluted PVA), then the base coat of paint went onto the walls and it was left to dry.

Before painting any more of the walls (mid coat, top coat and highlights), I applied lots of PVA glue to the surfaces that were not walls and liberally sprinkled a mixture of sand and tile grout to create a realistic looking ground covering. The white in the photo below is PVA glue.

The sand I used was a blend of yellow sharp sand from a builder's merchant, mixed with a very red sand (I cannot remember where it came from, but it is excellent material for making Mediterranean soil), mixed with a little ivory coloured powdered tile grout. 

I covered the whole hillside in this base "soil", then tipped off the excess onto a sheet of newspaper, then put it out to dry for a bit.

This is the tile grout. This 2.5kg bag cost about £7 to £8 from B&Q.

Whilst the base sand was still wet, I sprinkled, dropped and threw pinches of white tile grout onto the damp surface. The "throwing" of the tile grout creates little mounds and piles, which simulates rocky outcrops poking through the soil. Once I was happy that I had created enough rocky bits, I sprayed the whole thing in diluted PVA using a spray bottle.  This is what the whole thing looked like with the reddish base and then lots of little patches of white tile grout.

It looks a lot whiter in these two photos (above and below) because it is not yet wet with the diluted PVA sealant and the areas that only had a light dusting of white look a lot whiter than they end up being.  You can see the little "rocks" of tile grout in the photo below prior to it being sprayed and sealed.

When wet with the PVA, this is what it looked like...not quite so white. After spraying, leave to dry completely.

Once it had dried, I applied a thin dusting of both the red coloured sand and also some more white tile grout. The red sand was lightly dusted over most of the hillside again and then a track was marked out using more white tile grout.  The effect of adding a light dusting of red sand, once wetted with the diluted PVA, was the red "soil" sits in the crevices of the tile grout "rocks" and creates a really nice realistic effect.  Adding the white tile grout to create a farm track at the same time meant that I could balance the two colours against each other to achieve the effect I wanted.

Again, after applying the sand and tile grout, it was sealed with diluted PVA glue from a spray bottle and left to dry. With only light dustings of both colours, I didn't need to apply quite so much PVA on this coat, so drying time in the sun was pretty quick.  You should be able to see in the photo below the edges of the terraces, where they sit atop the wall; I piled up a little extra red sand so that the terrace overlapped the top of the wall.

And that completes the basic build. Onto the decoration. Before applying any flock or scatter material, I painted the next few coats onto the walls to finish them off.  A detailed tutorial on how I made the walls is described in another blog post, but the basics were:

1. Mid grey colour "wet-brushed" on; leave to dry
2. Whitish colour dry-brushed very lightly onto the upper half of the wall; leave to dry
3. Pale terracotta dry-brushed a little more heavily across the whole wall to make it look a bit sandier and to blend all the colours together

Once the walls had been done, I started on the really fun part: growing some vegetation. I have used a real mixture of all sorts of material, most of which comes from Woodland Scenics. I referred back to my reference photos for some inspiration on how the vegetation spilled over the walls and in between the stones.

Here is what it looks like finished off and ready for the gaming table.

The larger bushes were created using some fibres from a coconut liner for a planter, dipped in neat PVA, then dipped into flock/scatter/clump, left to dry and then stuck into place.  There is a better description of the tools, materials and technique on this earlier blog post.

Next up, I think, will be to revisit the tree-making and create some more trees on individual bases, which can be placed along the terraces.