Sacred spring of Aphrodite with water effect

Good looking terrain adds a lot of flavor to a game, and trees and rocks are bound to get stale after awhile. I bring you the Sacred Spring of Aphrodite. This is actually an upgrade of a piece of terrain that I had done before. From top to bottom, the statue is a Greek Civilian from Warlord Games painted in ivory standing on a rounded wooden 25mm "checker", also painted off-white. Underneath her, several crudely wrought pieces of styrofoam. This is the old styrofoam that appears to be made out of little pebbles -- they'd be ugly 90% of the time but here I think they work, suggesting a composite rock formation -- I'm no geologist. I cut a gouge into the styrofoam and painted it blue, green, and white for some water agitation. The pool at the bottom is a mixture of PVA glue and paint -- I got that mixture to a light blue and then, after painting a thick soup into the ring surrounded by the little (fake) stones, I stirred in some darker blue in a circular motion and stopped before it was mixed in, creating what I think is a nice swirling effect -- the water moves because of the trickle down the rock. All the greenery is either cuts from a bit of JTT flowering meadow or just glued-on flock. The small flowers are also JTT meadow, the larger flowers are real dead flowers that at one point I thought would last forever, but probably won't.

She's a fun terrain piece because she gives flavor to any Classical battleground, and could even have an enchantment effect if you were to play a fantasy game around her.

I offer this as tribute to Aphrodite, sprung from the Sea-Foam, wife of Hephaestus, lover of Adonis, Anchises, Cinyras, Dionysus, Hermes, and Ares, goddess of the shell and the comb and the net. Deliver me a woman with a tiny spark of your divine beauty, and excellent hair.

Sparabara, Elephants, Greek Cavalry, Psiloi, and Indians: what I did for Christmas break

I'm not crazy about uniforms; a lot of my troops are motley but sometimes you've got to have the unifying influence of an imperial superpower depicted in matching pajamas. Hence, my sparaparas.

 Did you know the word "pajamas" comes from Persia? This blog is educational.
 
Only the red and yellow sparas are new. I placed them with their blue and purple brethren to show the contrast between squads.

 And these studs are my Immortals. Only half are new. I had to turn an 8 man unit into a 16 man unit because small units in Hail Caesar are never heavy hitters (makes sense), and the Immortals should be deadly -- mind you, they'll still prefer missile fire over engaging with any of the other elite foot soldiers of their day.

 Elephants! Not much you need to say about elephants. They're big; sometimes they step on you. I'm really digging the scalemail on that rider on the beast in the middle. Also I glued a Persian bow to his back just in case anybody ever whined about that elephant having a ranged weapon (as the standard Hail Caesar elephant unit has). There's a part of me that wants to slap some brass tusk-sheathes on these guys and some Indian designs on their blankets, but for the moment, I'm happy with them

 Greek slingers! and a couple of javelin men. Got em on ebay for cheap.

The last time I played my Greeks I was dismayed by how little cavalry I had, so I painted these dudes up.

Indian swordsmen! I have so many charismatic Indians in the Persian army that they may have to break off into their own division -- including those elephants, of course.

 I've been brainstorming some terrain ideas, and came up with this ruin -- a fishtank decoration mounted with some talus, cork, and moss. Also this annoying not-quite-static grass I have that I can't figure how to get into any shape except this little plume.

Cheap plastic palm trees based with sand add a little desert flair.

 And these are what I'm happiest about -- modular difficult terrain. Just a few patches of rocky ground that you could put anywhere. Talus and sand on bases that aren't sized right for any of my men. The upper three also have bits of Christmas wreath

Building terrain: broken green hill

I've made a few fun terrain features before, but nothing that my little friends can really climb on and fight over, so I got it into my head to make a hill. Nothing fancy here, but I'm happy with the results so I'll share my process with you, Internet.

I envisioned a hill with several terraces or tiers so that soldiers could inhabit it at different levels. Units the size of my 40-man phalanx would never be able to use this, unfortunately, but smaller units could. So I cut up and stacked some regular styrofoam.

I needed some brown paint -- a lot of people do green on green for hills, but I was going for a look with plenty of exposed dirt. A less lazy person would have gone out and bought some brown paint, but I noticed that there was some wood stain in my basement, so I figured I'd try that.

And this was the result. Looks like an ill-made chocolate cake and took a long time to dry. Regular acrylic paint probably would have been better.

But, once dried, it was a very serviceable brown lump.I had a layer of glue-water solution on the flat areas before I started sprinkling flock and afterwards I went back over the greenery dripping glue solution on any place that seemed to need a little more stick.  I have a bag of light green foliage material that is held together by tiny strings -- if you want loose flock, you have to stretch the clumps between your fingers until the green falls loose. However, this rain of green fluff gave me really nice coverage -- the flock fell not just onto the big flat areas I was planning to flock, but also into cracks and niches.  This reminds me of how plants grow even in inconvenient areas such as rocky slopes.

Here we are more or less finished. There are 4 tiers of height on which minis can stand, including a "king of the mountain" highest position that can only hold 1. I glued on a few fake plaster rocks to break up the green, but in the camera flash their whiteness is just too jarring, so I'm going to give them a light brown wash. Think I need some trees?