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I leapt into action today on returning from a walk around Blackburn Lake, and decided to make a start on renovating and finishing my wargames scenery.

My top priority is making some hills that look like they belong in a semi desert / mediterranean environment. I’ve already made some grassy hills, so all the thinking has been done already on how to do the basic structure.

First off, I cut the hills out of expanded polystyrene foam packing from flatpack furniture and appliances. We have lots of that because we’ve just moved house. I used a Woodland Scenics Hot Wire Foam Cutter outdoors in our fancy al fresco dining (and terrain making) area, because the fume are pretty nasty. I see Woodland Scenics sell foam with non toxic fumes now. I tried using a knife to cut foam once but it ended up looking like it’d been snowing.

Once I’ve got the basic shape right, I carve the hills down as much as I can – 15mm 4Sp bases fall over backwards on pretty much any slope, and other elements just slide down the hill. Phil Barker talks about glueing steel foil to hills so that figures on magnetic bases stick to them, but I haven’t seen any examples of that in practice.

Once the carving’s done I go over the hills fairly gently with sandpaper to remove any marks left by the wire cutter.

The last step in the actual construction process is to glue the hill onto something (I use vinyl flooring) so that the edges (which are very thin) don’t get knocked off.

Hills drying off after their bases were glued on

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