Algerian/Mediterranean rocky hills

Back in early March I started mucking about with some old polystyrene ceiling tiles and insulation blocks that I'd had in the loft for many years.  I wanted to create some rocky hills/escarpments that I could use both for the Italian theatre of World War 2 and also for my Algerian War project.  Any terrain I make has to have at least a dual purpose to make it worthwhile for the time and effort and also from a storage aspect, which both of these resources being limited.  

The first batch were made from sticking together two polystyrene ceiling tiles with PVA which then had to be left to dry.  They were then stuck on thin cereal packet bases.   I didn't bother basing the batch made from the thicker blocks. All the basic shapes and then the detail were cut out with my old Games Workshop/Citadel hot wire cutter which has done me sterling service for nearly twenty years.  I try to avoid using knives as polystyrene is a pain to work with and using knives just makes it even messier and blunts your blades.  I whizzed through this stage it's great fun and I can get a bit carried away. 

I then covered the shapes with lightly diluted PVA and added my mix of different sands and scatter and tea leaves that I also used on my jungle scatter.  Whether I'm basing miniatures or making terrain I always let the texturing dry overnight.  I then use an old decorating brush to get rid of any loose material. 

It was then onto the painting.  I started off with the long thinner hills made from the tiles.  I base coated them with a Dulux terracotta shade I'd had made up.  I then heavily drybrushed this all over with Dulux matched to Vallejo Iraqi Sand.  Checking this against my Savannah gaming mat showed that it wasn't a very good match so I experimented by adding washes of different browns and adding patches of Citadel Dheneb Stone.  This helped but I still wasn't happy.  It was at this point that real world events turned things on their head.  I painted the blocks in the terracotta colour and then I exiled the half finished terrain back to the loft in mid-March.  

The long "tile" hills after base coating

It wasn't until the first week of May that I went down to the DIY store and had some more paints colour matched.  This provided me with the breakthrough.  I got all the part finished hills out of the loft and set to.  For the long hills which I'd done the most work on, I toned down a lot of the colour by using the Dulux Dheneb Stone match.  I love this colour for terrain.  This helped a lot.  For the block hills I more or less completely covered the terracotta colour with the Dheneb Stone paint.  

Rescued by Dheneb Stone

These were then heavily drybrushed with the Dheneb Stone mixed with the Iraqi Sand colour.  Further highlights with pure Iraqi Sand and then mixed with a cheap craft acrylic white followed to add more contrast.  I could have kept going with this and adding more variations, but you have to know when to stop and so I left them at a point where I was comfortable with how they looked.  

Next up will be to paint the bases of all my 15mm WW2 Italian campaign collection to match.  And that's a fair few platoons and support weapons.