Improving my Terrain

After handing in my thesis this monday, I´ve finally some more time to continue painting, crafting and gaming without remorse. So, I´ve decided so do some more work to finish some ongoing work and improve my terrain. I´m still wargaming on a limited budget and prefer to spend money on minis rather then terrain - this is why my playing field still looks somewhat... raw and unrefined. I´m aiming to constantly add bits and pieces to improve on the looks of the area, but as I scratch-build most of the stuff, it takes some time until things start looking decent. ;)  And I don´t want to waste this time by not playing.

Soo, today I´ve (almost) finished my new cornfield:

Another Field

 The recipe for this one is simple, but labour-intensive:
some papier-mache (or corrugated cardboard or any other base material), styropor to create a basis for the plants. The plants are made from wire (cut in short pieces) and cut paper glued on it. Add green color and that´s it. But cutting and glueing all the leaves onto the plants is very tedious.
But the field is essentially free if you don´t count the working hours and made from waste!

Next, I finished my experimental tree. After this first trial I´m not 100% happy with the result, but I´ll try another one with a slightly different approach - maybe that yields better results. Because I currently lack a decent number of trees, it will probably be used anyway.

Experimental Tree

Most expensive component here: spraying-glue. (Bought for 9€ to build more trees, normal price is around 13€, but with 400ml content I hope I can create a lot of trees, which would make it a worthwile investment)
Other components: cotton (synthetic) which I´m using for smoke and explosions, and some black primer + green spraying color.

Finally, I´ve started to improve the cardboard-buildings by giving them some structure:

Buildings are about to get treated with a BIG knife!

Result - still a bit rough, still needs some detail-work.

 This rendering is simple wall-filler (picked up for less than 2€ a pack) which is simply applied on the cardboard. As you can see, I only applied the roughwork on the house to test the result and it needs some more love to look decent. Furthermore, I hope that my skills will improve after this first test :)

It´s still certainly better than:

Isn´t it?

The new version is a little bit too white for my taste, but nothing that cannot be set right with some painting.

Next Up, as I promised it some weeks ago:
Tutorial on my Version of Multicam.
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