yeah, i'm pretty chuffed at how the mesa's turned out, considering they where whipped up over a couple of days at the last minute
the proceedure was as follows:
get loads of extruded styrofoam in flat sheets, preferably dense stuff (the kind you get in appliance boxes was very useful for this)
using a hot wire rig, carve into many blob shapes
stack blobs into piles
glue blob piles with pva glue. wait a day
once glue is dry, get a hot-knife or wood burning tool (or if you dont have one, a soldering iron will do, i used a wood burning tool which is basically a soldering iron with an adjustable set of tips, i used the thin spike one, so a soldering iron would be less good but similar) and use it to score rings into the foam, further detail with cracks between the rings and chips on the tops (this is the stage where dense styrofoam really helps)
paint with a mix of paint, polyfilla and a little water. when the paint is still wet (as in, after each mesa is painted) dust lightly with very fine sawdust (if you've the option, you want the stuff that comes from a power sander, rather than a saw)
once dry, paint over again with more watered down paint. do this once again in the cracks, the purpose is to cover all the foam enough that the spraypaint doesnt get to it
spraypaint it a lighter colour so that the base colour shows through in the gaps and valleys
drybrush it a lighter colour again.
the colours i used where: Raw Sienna for the base coats, White Knight Touchups Sandbank for the spray, and a mis-tinted creamy white for the drybrush (its fairly close to a bleached bone colour, a bit whiter)
and yes, the armies looked great.
full report is up over
herehopefully this will convince lyle and the likes to come along next year XD
oh, and the lists where 4000 (with the titan bash lists being 5000)
