Rocks have an important role to play as part of your LOTR terrain. As well as making it look more realistic they can act as cover, give your troops a better place for using ranged weapons or modify how you and your opponent manoeuvre on the battlefield.

Part 1 of Rock Making for Beginners looks at using polystyrene, both compressed and expanded, to make some standing stones. It doesn’t look at creating cliff faces or crags nor does it go into adapting actual rocks to use as scenery. Using real rocks will be covered in Part 2. As a beginner myself I have tried to make this article as easy to follow as possible. The techniques employed are simple and it shouldn’t cost much to get the materials required to have a go yourself.

Compressed vs. Expanded Polystyrene – What’s the difference?

Compressed polystyrene is often used as building insulation. It is typically pink or blue in colour and has a dense structure i.e. the air spaces between the particles is small. As such it is an ideal modelling material since it can be cut and sanded fairly easily and due to its density is fairly strong. It often features in some of the terrain articles in White Dwarf magazine (The pink stuff they use) and can be bought from builder’s merchants and larger DIY stores. If you are still at school you could try asking your art or craft department if they have some scrap compressed polystyrene they wouldn’t mind letting you have. They may well oblige if you tell them what you want it for.

Expanded polystyrene is the white stuff used for packaging fragile consumer goods and unlike the compressed stuff has a larger open texture. This is due to the fact that the beads are much bigger. This open texture makes it more brittle than the compressed type and cutting it makes much more mess. The particles often get charged with static electricity and stick to everything. I’ve found the best way to clear it up is to suck up the pieces with the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. Its one real advantage is that it is easy to get hold of in sheets and blocks and shaped pieces formed to protect things may be just the shape you are looking for, which saves you some time and effort in shaping.

I imagine that most people will find compressed polystyrene much easier to work with, but if you can get any don’t despair, since in this article I will look at using both types.

Note: - A safety issue to be aware of.
If you are using a hot wire cutter to shape polystyrene any fumes produced can be nasty to breathe in, so ensure you have good ventilation when doing this. I don’t use a hot wire cutter in this article but it’s worth mentioning anyway so you know to be wary of the fumes if you use one.

A Note About the size of Brushes

As you can see from the picture below, when you are doing terrain based work it is obviously not a good idea to use the brushes you use for painting your miniatures. Get hold of some brushes that are appropriately sized for the task. I have a larger brush I use for gluing and applying dilute PVA and another one for undercoating terrain. Since I also have an intermediate sized brush with squared off bristles that I use for drybrushing, I usually use it for painting terrain too.

Step 1 - Base Preparation

The bases were cut out of 3mm thick hardboard. I used irregular oval type shapes big enough to have a standing stone at one end and an area in front of it that might have smaller rocks or bushes.

The edges of the base were chamfered using a sanding block and sandpaper to lessen the potential step effect of the base edge when placed on the gaming table.

Thick card or other materials could be used as an alternative base material, but by using hardboard there is less chance of getting a warped base. You might consider using thin cork tiles as a base. Since they are much softer than hardboard it might be an easier material to work with but I haven’t had any practical experience of using cork. Another tip I’ve come across is to coat the underside of the base with dilute PVA. This helps to stiffen the base and lessens the effect of any warping as a result of it getting wet during construction. I did this on my bases and left the dilute PVA to fully dry.

Step 2 - Preparing the Stones

Whilst the dilute PVA was drying on the undersides of the bases, I started cutting out and shaping the stones. The idea was to create a tall standing stone at least twice the height of a standard LOTR figure. For this article I decided to create one using compressed polystyrene, and one using expanded, to see if I could create the same finished look using either starting material. I used a craft knife to cut out a rectangular section of polystyrene.

This was then shaped with the knife to get the basic shape and size of the stone that I required. I then used my thumb and index finger to pinch bits out of the basic shape until I was satisfied with the overall appearance.

Note: - A safety issue to be aware of
Please be careful when using a knife, fingers are more important than scenery so take your time and work carefully. It doesn’t matter how old you are you can still make silly mistakes if you are not concentrating. I have the scars to prove it!

Since I was comparing making rocks out of both types of polystyrene this was done for one of each type. Once the undersides of the bases were dry, the prepared stones were glued to their bases using white PVA glue. They were then left for several hours for the glue to fully set. If you are using PVA either as a glue or surface primer it is important to let it fully dry. Most makes of PVA glue turn colourless when they are dry which is a good indicator to look out for. Anyway if rocks take several million years to form then you can wait for your rocks to dry overnight can’t you!

Step 3 – Coating Rocks with Sand and PVA Mix

I have used texture paint in the past when coating items to give them a stone-like appearance. This time I decided to make up a fairly thick mixture of fine sand and PVA glue. This was then applied to the rocks using a brush and occasionally a glue spreader. It’s worth noting that the Sand / PVA mix makes the polystyrene quite robust and helps to disguise the big ‘cells’ of expanded polystyrene quite nicely. It also gives the rocks a sandstone / gritstone appearance that will highlight well when it comes to painting and is a nice overall effect.

Step 4 – Adding Fine Detail and Dilute PVA Coating

After the rocks were covered with the mix then PVA glue was spread over the bases. Smaller ornamental stones and GW modelling gravel were then scattered about the base to give a nice mix of stone sizes. Below is a picture of some ornamental stones that I bought to use as intermediate size rocks on terrain pieces and miniature bases.

The picture below shows the result of adding the small rocks and modelling gravel. They were then left overnight for the glue to fully dry.

Once the PVA glue had dried then a final preparation coat of dilute PVA was applied to the bases to seal all the added stones and gravel and give a nice surface to paint on. Again you need to wait for the dilute PVA to be fully dry. The pictures below show the two standing stones fully dry and ready for painting.

Step 5 – Painting

I often use non-GW paints when painting terrain undercoats since it is more economic than using GW paints. You will usually need quite a bit of paint for terrain pieces so colours like Black, White and a Dark Brown should give you all the basic colours you need. The picture below shows the type I use but any acrylic based paint should be appropriate.

I used Burnt Umber that is a rough equivalent of Scorched Brown as an undercoat for the standing stones. The picture below shows one of the stones with its undercoat applied. The undercoat needs to be fully dry before going on to add further colours.

I then applied a coat of Graveyard Earth to the stone. My larger drybrush was used to apply the paint. I tend to use an overbrushing technique as opposed to drybrushing. It is worth examining the difference between these two techniques.

Drybrushing – this is an effect where you can easily add highlights to areas of raised detail or fine texture to large flat areas. Extreme drybrushing often gives a dusty or chalky look to a model. To drybrush the paint needs to be fairly thick. Load the brush with some paint and then wipe off the paint on an absorbent surface like a tissue until the brush hardly leaves any trace of the paint on the surface. Then stroke the brush over the model where you want the highlight to be. By repeating the drybrushing you can build up a fine even layer of colour on the high points of the model. It took me ages to realise how dry the brush needed to be for true drybrushing. At first I was more likely overbrushing.

Overbrushing

As you can see from the picture below I actually applied quite a heavy coat of Graveyard Earth but you can still see some of the Scorched Brown (Burnt Umber) in the hollows.

Once you have finished with the Graveyard Earth leave the paint to fully dry.

The next colour to apply was Snakebite Leather. This was applied using a fairly heavy overbrushing technique. As you can see from the picture below it started to bring a more yellow appearance to the stone. Once again this coat of paint was allowed to dry.

Once the Snakebite Leather layer was dry then further layers were applied by mixing Snakebite Leather with increasing amounts of Bleached Bone to slowly add lighter and lighter shades to the stone. As these layers were applied my technique changed from overbrushing to drybrushing to apply the paint in a subtler manner. The final layer of Bleached Bone applied as a very fine drybrush to the very tips of areas that needed highlighting. The contrast between the finished stone compared to the basic undercoat can be seen in the picture below.

Step 5 – Finishing Off

This is the stage I really enjoy when I get to add some static grass and moss etc to add an extra degree of realism to the piece. Spread PVA glue where you want your Static Grass to go and sprinkle it onto the base. I deliberately didn’t add any glue to the vertical stone since I wanted a nice contrast between the stone and the base.

Note: - If you aren’t already aware Static Grass gets everywhere so I suggest having your scenery in a shallow tray or container when you are doing your sprinkling. Also this means you can gather up the loose stuff and use it again.

I then added a sprinkling of small bits of reindeer moss to give the effect of small plants growing out of the grass. Finally for this piece I added two larger pieces of reindeer moss as definite bushes, one of which was growing out of the obvious crack in the stones surface. The completed standing stone can be seen in the picture below compared to the unfinished one.

The second stone was completed using the same painting techniques as the one featured as an example in this painting section.

Conclusion

As you can see from the photographs below the two standing stones look very similar despite using two different types of polystyrene to construct them. This proves it is possible to get a decent result with expanded polystyrene provided some steps are taken to disguise its course structure.

In practice I think most people would use the compressed type if available due to ease of working and the fact that you don’t necessarily need to use the additional step of coating the surface of the polystyrene. I have made some other rocks for some friends without coating the polystyrene and the results were excellent.

This completes “Rock making for beginners – Part 1 (Using Polystyrene)”.
Part 2 will cover Rock making using actual rocks.
I hope you will be inspired from this article to create your own rocks even if you’ve never tried it before. It’s easier than you think even if you are a beginner. I look forward to seeing your efforts.

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