Ok, not so long back I told you about the freebies you can get from artificial grass suppliers in the way of samples, and I promised you that I’d make something with mine, to help inspire you out there with what kind of thing you can do with them when they arrive.
Before I start, I keep getting folks telling me off for not putting enough pics of the stages in my mini tutorials (Sorry bout that, I get distracted from the fact, and I’ll admit, I do forget sometimes before moving onto the next bit!) So I tried my best to give you some idea of how I got from A to B.
With this being a test piece, I wanted something reasonably simple and easy to do, given that pretty much most of the work is already done with the turf in the first place, a rough field was easiest to do, so opted for that. I took one of the biggish bits I had, using 1cm high blades of grass as my main area and stuck it onto a piece of A4 sized hardboard to start with. This was followed by taking another same sized off cut, this time using 2cm high grass, and cutting it into four strips to use as rough hedges. These were then glued around the edge of the first piece on the board. I used impact adhesive to glue the turf, since the bottom of the turf is rubberised, it ended up being the best bet as my glue supplies were low, but had a large tube of this stashed. You could use a glue gun or even no nails would do, just don’t use superglue as you’ll go through tons of it!
As you can see, by this point I had decided to get some stumpy looking twigs from outside and add some rocks and texture in parts with milliput, mainly to cover up any unsightly edges at the base of the turf. I usually wouldn’t waste milliput like this, but use real pebbles and rocks glued on, but I was lacking any superglue/suitable adhesive, so milliput was the next best thing (remember, I didn’t want to spend anything on making this, so my plan was to just use what I had at hand in my stuff) These were all left to dry overnight. You may also notice that once the turf was stuck down pre milliput etc, I had a good hack at the turf with a pair of scissors. This was to create more an excercise in getting rid of the uniformity of the height of the turf at the edges. If you do the same, make sure you do it outside or get something to catch the debris, the bits get everywhere!
Once the Milliput was cured, I painted it and the base with earth brown artists acrylic, and again left it to dry.
Next, I set to painting in the textured milliput with browns and greys,and highlighted the tree trunks with several stages of lighter brown, and then I set to work on trimming it a little more into a more naturalistic shape.
I flocked the edges using first, an earth brown, then dark green, and finally some light green static grass to highlight. Pretty simple effort with PVA glue, which took me all of 15 minutes. As you can make out the rough foot path, which was achieved by lightly flocking the turfs surface with the brown flock again to give the effect of a well trodden path through the field. There’s also a ditch running down the inside edge of one of the hedges at the front, which has included some tiny dried leaves I found from outside (which were well dried out)
These little leaves were added to the hedges too, and some other dried flower stuff I had going spare. These were great as they were tiny flower buds and along with other detrius, some modelling lichen, twiggy bits etc, were all affixed with plenty of PVA. Lichen was also added to the trunks of the trees to simulate a bit of growth, and down the side of the path, as little scrubby brush foliage. I would have preffered more substantial stuff, but this was all left over stuff I had, so I did my best to make it look overgrown and sort of natural.
Thats about it, easy to make and pretty much free. Here’s a few pics of it in situ with some other 28mm terrain.
I’ll be trying some more of these, as they are pretty generic and so long as the grass isn’t really long, it’ll suit both 28mm and 15mm games. It’s not great mind blowing terrain, but its nice, serviceable scenics that everyone should have in their collection, and best of all free!!
I hope I have given you some ideas of what to do with this stuff, even so this was really basic with very little effort, there are loads of things that this turf can be used for. Next time I intend to go crazy with it and make something far more ambitious (of which, I’m not sure, I’ll let you know when I’ve made my mind up!)
Peace out…
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