Rocky Desert Hills for Wargames Tutorial Part 2

Some intergalactic pilgrims wind their way through the finished hills.

In part 1 of this tutorial I documented the construction of my rocky hills. In part 2, I'll cover painting and detailing these arid lumps of weathered, igneous stone.

Materials

You can skip the dropper bottles of hobby colors for terrain painting. All of my paints and brushes came from the hardware/DIY store. I took a few samples of hobby colors painted on cardstock and asked them for paint samples to match.  I used:

• Red/brown paint sample
• Light brown/mocha paint sample
• Bleached bone paint sample
• Olive drab/gray spray paint
• Dark gray spray paint
• 2 inch wide paint brush (don't sweat this, just use something decent sized)
• Grass tufts
• PVA/white glue

Base Coat

A lot of terrain tutorials I've read over the years suggest a fairly basic drybrush scheme. For hills like this they might suggest a base of dark brown, followed by a drybrush of medium brown, then sand beige and finally a light drybrush of off white.

I found that including a wider palette of colors created a more realistic and natural color tone in my terrain pieces. Even though I intend these hills to be fairly light sand colored, I use a a number of darker colors in the undercoat that peek through the drybrushing hinting at deeper geologic structures, weathering and history.

To that end, I started with a thick base coat of red/brown paint. I used a stiff brush and worked into the deep cracks of the hills, to cover all of the material and help fix and loose pieces of sand.

After the undercoat was dry, I sprayed olive drab/gray sporadically across the hills, trying to hit areas that seemed particularly stone like and to cover bits that escaped the base coat.

I then used the dark gray spray to hit deep crevices or large chunks of stone. I was very conservative with the dark spray, only hitting about 10% of each hill.

Can you make out the dark gray splotches on the right side of the hill?

The mix of red, olive green and dark gray provides the variety of tones I wanted to peek through and contrast the light sand drybrushing to come.

Drybrush

Satisfied with the undercoat, I started drybrushing heavily with the mocha brown paint sample. I used a wide, stiff house paint brush and was pretty brutal to the terrain pieces at this point. If I happened to scrub off some sand at this point, all the better. I'd rather do paint touch ups on missing texture now than after bits got knocked off during play.

I drybrushed most heavily on the horizontal surfaces that would be bleached by the sun. Vertical surfaces received a lighter drybrush, allowing more of the gray and rust red to show through.

Next I mixed some of the bleached bone with the mocha and drybrushed again.

A final light drybrush of pure bone white to hit the edges of the stone work and it was done!

Details

To add a hint of life to the hills I snuck in some withered desert grass tufts. I tried to find hidden crevices that might collect the scant water that falls on these arid hills and affixed the tufts with white/PVA glue.

Tweezers are pretty helpful here.

Fin

And that's it! This process took a while as I collected material and experimented with techniques, but overall these weren't very difficult to construct. I knocked together a few pieces of scatter terrain using the same steps and tie everything together. Looking forward to putting them into a game soon!