Making Sand Traps for Zombie Golf

Well, it's been a while since I had to make any scenery for All Things Zombie, but we had decided to add some sand traps to our games of Zombie Golf.  What I needed to do was decide how to make them.  This of course led to a lot of over-thinking, most of it helpful, some of it unnecessary, but all of it leading up to the following approach.

First to get together my materials.  PVA, an offcut of foamcore, my craft knife and two lovely three-hex base boards cut into 2mm MDF for me by David Drage a while ago.  Thanks Dave for the best bit of this build!

 Now, I planned to make the terrain using offcuts of foamcore to form the basic shape.  Once whis was dry, I'd apply poly filler.  It's a quick and cheap way of making scenery with bunched up newspaper and plaster impregnated cloth.  I didn't have any of the latter, and I felt the scenery piece was too small to use the newspaper method effectively on a small terrain piece like this.  For making landscapes, it's a brillian method.  For this, not so good.

And so i began sticking random strips of offcut foamcore to an MDF base!

 Once these had dried, I went and got my poly filler.  It was at this point that I discovered I hardly had any poly filler left.  As i was already committed to the project, I did what i could.  I took all the powder I could get from the boxes, and added a few drops of water.  I began mixing it, only to find that I had somehow created a poly filler soup rather than the usual paste I normally manage to mix.  Clearly things were quickly becoming rotten in the state of Denmark...sorry...Aberdeen.

So while I waited for the poly filler to thicken (which would prove to take an awful lot longer than I had anticipated), I decided the best thing to do was to get my tube of trusty miliput and try to cover one of the boards.

 It looked awful.  Thanks to the weight of the miliput, it soon began to sink into the contours of each individual piece of foamcore.  To say I was losing the will by this point would be a gross understatement.  It took a whole box of milliput to cover one of these pieces.  Sigh.

Meanwhile, the poly filler had thickened to a gloopy toothpaste consistency and didn't appear to be willing to do much more.  With much sighing and gnashing of teeth, I began pouring it and trying to convince it to stay in place.  it eventually looked like this:

 And here's them both the following morning when they had dried out.

 

 It was then time to look out my tester pot of emulsion I use to base coat such pieces of scenery.

 I gave them a few hours to dry out fully.  It's always best to leave emulsion four hours between coats.  Of course, by this point you could have argued I was deliberately staying away fromt he things because I was learning to hate them.  Anyhoo, time to apply the PVA for the flocking and sanding.  As you can see, I was using the curly-wurly model of glue application.  You could argue by now i was just playing...

 And here they both are fully flocked with Noch Spring Grass static flock and sand.  I got my sand from a bag of fine grain children's play sand from The Early Learning Centre.  Which just goes to show how many years ago I bought the stuff...

 And finally, after a second coat of PVA and sand was applied to them, they were placed on the table ahead of our first chance to try out our house rules for using them.  And you know what?  I think they turned out a whole lot better than I thought they would.

I'll post the results of our playtest soon!