Trash into terrain

I have been making some rubble piles out of some scrap polystyrene packaging. I got inspired by reading Dr Who and the Day of the Daleks and watching the old movie Dr Who and the Daleks invasion of Earth. So with pictures of Daleks trundling around between rubble piles in my head, off I went.

Phase 1
I made up some bases out of scraps of foam core or expanded PVC sheet I then glued pieces of styrene foams into shapes. I used some of the corner offcuts of the foam to give some vertical support structure to the Polystyrene chunks. Then I added some chunks of cork and small rocks to increase the texture and fill in some of the gaps.

I added so

These are some linear wall shapes, I ripped pieces off the foam to make the outlines more irregular.

These are the second generation piles. I didn't bother with the extra texture from small rocks and just made the foam more irregular.

Once the foam chunks have dried they get coated in a plaster slurry to tie the shapes together and protect the foam. Using a coarse brush also helps to give some additional texture.

After watching another terrain video I saw how someone made rock texture by ripping chunks out of the foam. I made some circular pieces and layered them to make piles. The pieces are a bit uneven so it makes some angles rather than look like a pile of pikelets.

I can even stack the pieces on top of each other to make a larger pile about 10" tall.

Now with some paint on them. These are painted up from black with several layers of grey, then they are given a wash of raw umber to simulate some dirt and put a bit of warmth into the pieces. This is just tubes of acrylic paint.

Now with some Huge Miniatures - Bog Scatter for a bit of extra texture and colour. this also simulates making the concrete look a bit more overgrown. The Bog Scatter has some small orangeish pieces in ot so it looks a lot more autumn than some other flock packs.

Here are the first generation pieces in a game layout. They are on a mat I got from Mats from Mars. The first generation rubble piles I dabbed with some AK interactive earth texture and then added some mixed green vegetation texture from Woodland Scenics. I think the dirt colour is a bit bright. So I think I will go back over the vegetation with a PVA wash to help seal it and mix in a little raw umber to darken those areas.