Next up on Crafting List is to mess around with some ideas on wall sections. I really don’t expect or need to make a bunch of these but I am using them to do a few experiments on a couple techniques. So this is Part 1 and my delve into messing with some XPS foam.
The prep is pretty standard for doing any foam terrain. Yes, these make look a little shorter than most. That’s on purpose. My old “walls’ were 3/4 inch tall rather than 1 inch. This made them tall enough to “feel” like walls but not too tall to block line of sight to most miniatures.
My first obstacle is that the foam is so light. Many folks use nuts, washers, coins or even screws to counterbalance. But I’ve got shorter walls and wanted as much mass as possible at the bottom of the wall. So I grabbed some brad nails.
The idea is that I want to distribute as much mass as possible at the bottom of the wall to prevent them from tipping over. A simple horizontal slit on the underside and I pushed in two nails on the bottom of each wall section. When I did this I put the head of each nail opposite the other one.
Of course just to be sure, I wanted to add some small bases. For this, I opted for the good old Popsicle sticks or craft sticks cut to size. You could hot glue this. Personally, I hate hot glue guns but this is based on my own inability to use them with getting a tangle strands and making a mess. So I lifted an idea from Professor Dungeon Master from the Dungeon Craft Youtube channel. DAP Kwik Seal. It’s cheap. Water clean up. Paintable. And dries like a glue. It’s what I used for my Dungeon Stackers so it seems to work.
Then the simple part. Just slap on some paint. I know that this isn’t the best paint job. It was more about coming up with a proof of concept.
My final thoughts. It works well. The craft stick bases might be a bit of overkill but these little walls are pretty stable.