After spending years and years being afraid to try it, as it looked far too complex and intimidating, I finally dove in and tried my hand at snow effects.
I searched quite a few forums, and by far the most common technique I found was a paste that was made from a combination of baking soda, white glue, and white acrylic paint.
I had recently made my first winter terrain for Frostgrave games, but I had only used Woodland Scenics snow flock. It looks good but the problem is that you can only achieve a "dusting" of snow with it. Looks great for wintry, frozen ground, but you can't achieve any real accumulation or snow drift effects.
If I had known how easy this was, I would have been doing winter terrain years ago!! This technique is fantastic. I mixed up the three ingredients, and made it a bit on the stiffer side so that it would be able to be heaped a bit and wouldn't run down or flatten out too much.
The REALLY cool part about this paste is that because the white glue and baking soda are heavy, it makes this gritty sort of textured paint kind of base medium, very similar to what Vallejo and Liquitex sells in their brands of medium ranges.
After seeing this paste in operation, there is absolutely no need to buy any special type of snow product! I can make buckets of this stuff with the materials I already own.
The only other item used in the process was the Woodland Scenic snow flock. The paste looks good by itself, but I found that adding a layer of the flock to the top of the snow gives it a more realistic, flaky look. The paste itself settles and looks a bit too much like blobs of white glue, even with the baking soda texturing.
I was even able to do some more subtle effects like having bits of snow caught in the crooks and elbows of some of the tree limbs.
Pretty cool stuff, I'm so glad I finally tried it! Makes me want to do a WWII historical diorama of the Battle of the Bulge or something!
Some pictures:
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