Having made numerous rock and stone terrain over the years, one thing that I had never been able to achieve is that ultra-realistic look you see in model railroading layouts cliffs and rocks.
This is one of those things that somehow always went under my radar, I always admired how amazing it looked when I would see a model railroad layout but never actually thought about how it might be done!
After finally doing some research and watching some videos on Youtube, I learned that to do rocks and cliffs with that really real-looking texture and color you actually make the rocks a base color of WHITE. Model railroaders paint their layouts of rocks and cliffs in white and actually use that as their base color so to speak.
Don't ask me why but in all my years of making wargaming terrain this had never occurred to me! The basic idea is that you start with a white undercoat. Many modelers achieve that with acrylic gesso, applied over either one of those plaster cliff or rock molds that you can cast, or like I'm doing here with a base material of pink insulation foam.
The other thing that had never occurred to me is that you DON'T actually paint a full-strength color by hand on the rock surfaces. You either use an airbrush to lightly apply color over the white, or you do what I'm going to do which is use a brown or black wash directly over the white gesso.
The reason I mention all of this is that for me this feels like a counter-intuitive way to make rock terrain! My first instinct is to always paint my foam a base color of gray or brown and then drybrush white over that.
But in reality, you cannot achieve that high-level realism of model railroading rocks by painting and drybrushing, at least not in most cases. The wash over the white color is what seems to achieve this look.
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Eventually I'm going to do a larger dwarven terrain piece for fantasy wargames using this technique, but for now I thought I'd just practice with some simple rock formation.
Some pics of my progress:
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