Wanted a break from terrain work so I decided to paint some miniatures. I realized my skeleton collection is a bit of a mess - I've got the original Games Workshop ones, some from the D&D board game, and random ones I've picked up at flea markets. They all have different paint schemes and scales which bugs me.

Since skeletons are such a classic monster for games, I figured I should have a uniform group. So I bought some new ones (can't remember the brand or where from), simple multi-piece models, just basic skeletons. Got them on their bases, added my usual basing mixture, and now I'm ready to paint them all up to match.

I do my base coating in several stages. First, I base coat everything in black so that any unpainted spots don't show too much. Then I apply a bit of gray on the front, top, and back. After that, I do a white zenithal over it.

Back at my workshop, I do a white dry brush using Army Painter's Fanatic Paints - it has really good coverage. It might be overkill, maybe the gray layer isn't needed, or maybe the zenithal prime isn't either, but that's my current technique and it works well. I might remove a step later to save time, but for now I'm happy with it.

It gives a lot of color variation on the miniatures, which makes the speedpaints work really well over it.

And there you have it! This is what it looks like once I add the speedpaint on top.

I have two colors that I really like (Pallid Bone and Bony Matter) for making skeleton colors. Some of these I did directly on my undercoat, and others I did on a first layer of Bone White as a base color. That way it gives me a bit of variation in the final look.

And there they are: finished and stored on the shelf.

Quick doc on some scatter terrain I made. Basically just rocks for forest encounters.

I grabbed plastic rocks from various toy sets (Mega Bloks and others). What I like about them is they already have a natural rock shape, even though the texture is pretty smooth. They're also really solid which is great.

I glued them onto cardboard bases, then covered everything with a mix of glue, filler, and small pebbles/stones. This gives the smooth plastic surface more texture and roughness so they look more realistic.

Pretty simple project but they'll work great for adding some quick terrain to outdoor scenes.

I wanted to make some rock formation scatter terrain, and I had this idea. I could use those small pieces of plastic from some packaging I saved. I don't even remember what I ordered, but the shapes were pretty interesting, kind of irregular and going in all directions. So I figured, why not use those as a base and turn them into rocks?

And there you have it! This is what it looks like once you've added a bit of filling compound on top, mixed with a few pebbles, and applied a light dry brush over it. It's starting to look like rock formations.

I applied different colored inks on top to add some color variation to the rock underneath. Rocks in nature are never completely gray, so I used organic colors like brown and green, plus a bit of yellow and blue to break up the monotony.

Here they are drying with a few other scenery pieces I made along the way. I added plenty of flocking on top and completely soaked them with water mixed with paint and flow aid.

The flow aid helps everything absorb well everywhere, and when it dries, everything will be stuck on properly. My flocking won't come off.

I had zero trees for terrain, so I started an adventure trying to make some with whatever materials I had on hand. Not sure what the best approach is, but I figured it'd be good to have some scatter terrain for forest scenes.

I ran a bunch of tests with different materials:

• Mobile trees I already had
• Various toy trees I recovered
• Aquarium toys and plants
• Real branches from outside
• Basically anything I could find

This is my documentation of what I tried, what worked well, and what flopped.

Here you can see I tried to glue some aquarium plants around different shapes.

In the middle, the two white things are plastic tubes. I think they were originally tubes for texture rollers. I covered them with "bark" made with a hot glue gun, and glued different aquarium plants next to and on top of them.

My idea at that stage was to see if the plants, once painted, would look good enough, or if I'd need to cover them with additional textures.

I started painting the wood of the trunks and the ground. It wasn't super easy because I had to avoid painting the plants directly.

At this stage we have something that's not bad. The basic framework is a plastic toy on which I added bark myself with a glue gun and it looks good - the color is right, the base is good.

The issue is that the plastic plants are obviously plastic and they stand out from the rest. Even the canopy as it's made, you can tell it's plastic. I need to do a bit better than that.

Here, I started doing something interesting on another one of these trees. I actually started gluing flocking over all the visible areas on top. Here's the process I followed:

• Put loads of glue down
• Applied flocking over it
• Then reapplied a mixture of water, glue and flow aid so it absorbs completely and stays stuck

Working pretty well so far!

Here's a later progress shot. I also tried something interesting - applying extremely diluted black paint to the plastic plants to tone down their artificial look.

I don't remember the exact details anymore (was it black ink? dark green ink? did I dip them or brush it on?), but I know it really helped. It softened that obvious plastic appearance and made the trees blend together much more naturally.

For applying flocking on large areas, what worked best for me was to completely cover the surface with spackling paste first, then press the flocking by hand on top so it has something to grip onto. After that, I spray it with water and glue. Super messy and gets everywhere, but the final effect really gives that nice mass of flocking look.

I tried gluing it directly onto plastic plants, thinking the branches going in different directions would create a more natural effect, but honestly it's even messier and not really worth it.

If I had to do it again, I'd take balls of aluminum foil, cover them with the texture, and flatten the flocking on top. The key is really the shape itself more than having it go in all different directions.

Yeah, it's a repurposed Kinder figurine! I glued it on a wooden square with a plastic square on top to make a pedestal. Added some quick texture and then painted it.

I tried to do a marble effect and it turned out pretty well from a distance. Painted the whole thing purple, then added little white strokes. On top of those I added a light blue wash. Good enough marble effect.

I needed to make a statue of Desna and that worked pretty well. You can totally see it's marble.

This is one of the builds I'm most proud of! It has all the characteristics of what I love about terrain creation:

• The build is very simple to make
• Doesn't require much cutting
• It's quite pretty
• Represents well what it's supposed to represent
• Super solid to handle

And as a bonus, we're reusing materials that would normally go to the trash for something very useful.

The main idea is to reuse Heroclix bases. You can stack them on top of each other to make pillars. If you offset them slightly, the little notches on the sides make them look like stacked stones.

Heroclix minis are great but the bases are massive, so I've got tons of them lying around. This turned out to be a pretty good way to give them a second life.

At first I wondered if I should make pillars that were 5 bases high or bigger ones that were 10 bases high. The small ones weren't at the right scale compared to the characters, and with the big ones I thought they might block the lines of sight a bit too much.

So what I ended up doing was making pillars that are all 5 high. If I ever want to make a tall pillar, I can just stack 2 of them.

I added plastic circles at the top and bottom that I found, which were exactly the right size. But if you don't have any, you can replace them with cardboard cut to the right size - that works very well too. This ensures the top and bottom are completely flat and makes it much easier to stack them on top of each other.

I take some filling compound and moisten it slightly. Then I spread it around the pillar and wet my finger to smooth it out everywhere, making sure it gets into all the holes.

Then with a dry paper towel, before the filler dries, I wipe all around the pillar. This leaves the filler only in the gaps between bricks (to look like mortar), while completely removing it from the brick surfaces.

Another scatter terrain for the asylum scenario. Players start in an old laundry room where staff used to wash everyone's clothes. I needed to create some piles of laundry for the scene, so here's what I did: I glued crumpled aluminum foil onto cardboard bases to give it some volume and height. Next step is to add material on top that actually looks like clothing to finish it off.

I cut pieces of crepe paper in different colors and glued them onto the main form with a hot glue gun. The issue was that crepe paper is pretty stiff, so I sprayed a water and PVA glue mixture on them to make the paper conform better to the aluminum shape underneath.

The downside is that all the colors completely discolored and bled into each other, creating a big mixed mess of colors. So looking back, cutting different colored sheets wasn't really worth the effort since they all blended together anyway.

This is even more true since the next step is to cover everything with black modpodge, so my choice of different colors at the start was completely pointless.

I think it's time I documented this build. I started it two years ago and it's been sitting on my shelf ever since - still not finished.

I know I'll finish it one day though! I've learned some new techniques since then. I think it needs some flocking and a bit of color to break things up. Then it'll finally be something interesting to look at.

Right now it's not completely finished, but I still think it's worth documenting how I got to this stage.

So that's where it all starts - at the very base. I can't remember if I bought it myself at a flea market or if it was part of the pieces we got for my daughter that I ended up keeping. But these big knotty roots - I thought there was a way to do something cool with them. Especially with some of the trees.

I also grabbed a fake plastic bonsai from a store's trash. It has this really knotty tree shape and I got it for super cheap.

I started laying things out on a cork board and positioning different elements to try to get the general shape roughly right. Once it seemed correct to me, I drew the final shape on the cork that I needed.

I added quite a few pieces of foil to fill the holes and give some real structure to everything. Glued different pieces together to fill it all in properly.

Here's a view from below the build. What's nice is that the Playmobil piece is hollow, so I can really push the aluminum foil inside properly to fill it up as much as possible.

I glued the entire structure onto the cork, then continued adding aluminum foil all around to smooth out the transition between the structure and the ground.

I pushed a large piece of polystyrene into the hollow at the top and added the plastic bonsai I found. It's going to be this super tall tree towering above everything.

Also added a piece of polystyrene standing upright on the facade. That's going to be the entrance to the witch's dwelling.

I then added a bunch of details to the build! Started with the facade, glued on a door, then built up the area around it with different sized planks. Used matches, coffee stirrers, and popsicle stick pieces. For the triangle around the entrance, I went with larger sticks I found outside.

Added lots of little touches throughout. One cool idea I had was using plastic bones from an old dinosaur model kit and placing them around the piece. Once painted, they should blend in with the roots to create this roots-and-bones vibe.

Put a trapdoor in the back for another entry point, added some small stairs going up the tree, threw in some mushrooms, and made a little tiled roof. Scattered more details here and there.

Next step is to unify everything with paint!

I made a filler paste mixture with a bit of sand to give it some grittiness. Added a little brown ink to it as well - helps me see where I've applied it properly, and if I miss a spot it won't be as noticeable as white would be.

I applied it pretty much everywhere to get better adhesion between all the different parts. It helps bring out the cork grain more clearly, fully covers the aluminum, and gives a more uniform look to all the pieces I glued together.

Once it was dry, I applied a second coat to the areas that needed a bit more coverage.

So I moved on to painting. First I covered everything in black to make the different pieces easier to paint later. Then I started blocking in all the brown earth sections, the tree itself in another color, and anything that needed to be lighter in white for now. I also did some dry brushing on the stone exterior.

But honestly, this is where I kind of lost motivation for the project. While I had a super clear vision for the structure and I was really excited about this witch's house nestled in the roots of a giant tree, I didn't really have a plan for the colors. Everything is dark, swampy, and just ends up being brown and grey. I tried adding color with the mushrooms, roof, and pumpkins, but it's not enough.

When I get back to painting this, I think I need certain elements to really pop color-wise. The pumpkins definitely need to stand out. The bone pieces probably should too. Maybe the mushrooms as well. And I'll need to add some interesting flocking.

I'm also unsure about the tree itself. Should I add Spanish moss hanging down? A rope? It already has this nice abandoned look going for it, but I'm not sure how to paint it exactly. That's where I'm kind of stuck on what to do next.

Quick post to document how I made some firewall effects for a scenario I was working on.

I took a sheet of transparent plastic - didn't buy it, just recovered packaging from a blister pack that came with something from a store.

Then I used a hot glue gun to put little flames/lines of glue next to each other on one side. Let it dry, then did the same thing on the other side. Once dry, I cut roughly between the two layers.

Finally, I glued that vertically on a piece of cardboard and done!

For the painting, I did something really rough. I did it with speed paints because they're quite liquid and seep well into the holes.

I started doing one block at a time. First, I covered absolutely everything from top to bottom in yellow. Then while the paint was still wet, I covered the bottom two-thirds in orange, mixing it vaguely so you can still see some yellow showing through.

After that, I took red and only did the bottom third with it. Same approach - not really mixing, just painting poorly over it. The idea is that you can see the successive layers of orange, yellow and red.

I think at the very end, I even added a little bit of black on the extremities at the top.

There is an amazing scenario in Rise of the Runelords, in the Hook Mountain Massacre book. Players have to rescue some rangers who've been captured by a family of hill giants (or maybe ogres, I can't quite remember) led by a matriarch. The whole family is hilariously dumb, but also morbidly grim, which makes for such a fun atmosphere.

I've never managed to get my players far enough in this adventure path to actually run this encounter, but I really want to use it somehow. I'm thinking of dropping it into another campaign.

To prep for that, I wanted to create a full roster of all the members of the Graul family that appear in that scenario. So I dug through my collection of ogre and hill giant miniatures to see what I have available to represent the whole family.

The first figurine you see at the top is a Heroclix figurine with its arms raised in the air. I believe it's supposed to represent a brute that escaped from psychiatric ward. The second one in blue is an ogre figurine that comes from the World of Warcraft board game.

The next three minis also come from Heroclix. The pale green one is from their fantasy range with the somewhat deformed characters. The one carrying a piece of wood comes from their horror range. And the big green one is obviously Hulk.

The gray one is a zombie from some board game similar to Zombicide, but not actually Zombicide. The next one holding a staff is a Frankenstein-type figure from the Heroclix Horror range. The one behind with arms outstretched, looking like it's about to fly, is also a Frankenstein from Heroclix, though I can't remember which specific range.

The obese figurine sitting down eating an arm with a cleaver in hand comes from the Heroclix Horror range. It's the perfect representation of the matriarch of the group.

The Cyclops behind her is a plastic toy, that one can buy in regular toy shop. The red one is also coming from a board game, but I can't remember the name (I have other such miniatures, in other colors).

Finally, the green double headed thing is coming from Heroclix as well. And the one at the very far end is probably worth a fortune as it's a metal miniature of Thrudd the Barbarian, a very early (1982, I wasn't even born!) Games Workshop mini.