Woodland scatter terrain

Taking a break from the Sikh Wars project I decided to make some scatter pieces to complement the tree bases I'd made last year.

I spend a lot of time walking or running in mixed deciduous woodland and there's much more to a wood than trees.  Much of the greenery is from the understudy community of numerous plants and I wanted to simulate this. 

As these pieces didn't need any strength I decided to make the bases out of EVA foam sheets.  It's more or less weightless, takes paint and scatter material well and can be cut with scissors.  Therefore it's quick to work with.

I always paint the sheets with cheap craft acrylic paint to begin.  I think it gives a better starting surface. After cutting out the basic shapes and bevelling the edges with scissors, I covered each shape with PVA and added my usual sand mix.  They were left to dry overnight.

Next stage was an undercoat of Dulux matt emulsion that I'd had mixed up to match Vallejo Leather Brown.  Once dry I applied a drybrush with Dulux matched to Citadel Foundation.

The emulsions dry very quickly so it was soon time to add the foliage.  I started with  the clump foliage I'd made out of old washing up scourers.  These were glued on with superglue.  I was going for speed so didn't want to wait for PVA to dry.  After getting the bigger bits in place, I then added different colours and sizes.  

I then worked through my foliage box adding various grasses, flocks and grass tufts.  At this point I also experimented by adding smaller bits and flock directly onto some of the larger clumps to get a more realistic bushy look.

When all this has been left to settle overnight I drybrushed each base with Dulux matched to Vallejo Iraqui Sand. I also carefully drybrushed some of the foliage with this colour.  The base edges were neatened up with the Leather Brown colour.  The final step was to drip heavily diluted PVA onto the foliage to seal and harden it.  Job done!