The hills are alive.....

 ....with the sound of flocking.  Apologies to Julie Andrews. Regular readers will recall that I picked up some Kallistra mountains at Hammerhead, and with the briefly pleasant spring weather, it was time to tart them up.

I got two double hex mountains pre-flocked and eight single hex mountains unflocked. My plan is to try and make these as general purpose as possible so I can use them on my temperate, desert and snow boards! A bit of a tall order perhaps, but my experience of mountains is that snow is rarely on the sides, just the tops.

I'd normally do stuff like this in the shed, but months of continuous rain have made the door swell up so much it was jammed shut and I managed to put my back out trying to get the d**n thing open, pulling the door handle off in the process. So somewhat grumpily I ended up doing the prep work outside.

The pre-flocked hills. I just lightened up the summits with some more builders sand. I don't want to fiddle around with these too much as they are quite neatly flocked with a good mix of tones.

Three of the single hex mountains I put sandy coloured flock on the summits - some sort of sandstone perhaps. This is the same colour as my desert hexon tiles. Just thick PVA and flock. 

Then I went over all the bare plastic with thick PVA and covered them in builders sand. You can see the contrast between the sand and the desert flock. The sand is the same stuff I use on my figure bases, it comes out of a 25 year old bag of sand in the shed - if I can get the door open. I keep a tray in the house for basing purpose.

These three hexes are going to get some snow treatment, but I did a base of sand anyway as I'm not planning on doing the entire thing covered in snow. The sand also covers the shiny plastic far better than standard flock.

Once the glue had dried, at first glance it looked like the sand and the desert flock had come out identical in tone! But I realised it was just a trick of the light, in better light you can still see the contrast. There are a few shiny bits where the sand hasn't stuck, but I'll be going over them again with more flock.

I picked out three of the mountains for some light snow treatment. I sprayed white on the upper surfaces and then applied some snow flock. tbh the flock was a bit disappointing, it is very translucent and I was hoping for a bright white effect I had the same problem when I flocked my snow boards, but they look OK I guess.

Once the snow flock had dried, I brushed off all the excess sand, flock etc and gave all of them a light drybrush of magnola on the upper edges of the exposed 'rock' surfaces. It doesn't really show up in the photos unfortunately, but it helps highlight them and give a bit of texture. I then added static grass clumps over the lower slopes which is the same tone as that on my temperate boards, and the grass clumps on my snow and desert boards. 

With them all done and dried, they went off to join my other Hexon terrain. I've got a few scenarios in mind which need some mountains, in particular I'd like to re-run the Tunisia game I did back in lockdown and also have a go at Monte Cassino based on Chris Kemps NQM scenario.

And what of the recalcitrant shed door? Well, I screwed the door handle back on with much longer screws, and eventually got it open assisted by jamming a screwdriver between the door and the frame. I spent some time it planing down so hopefully it won't get stuck so badly in future. The door is thick 170 year old fine grained Victorian pine and has never stuck like that before, but I guess that is climate change for you as our winters here get warmer and wetter.