Terrain from spare parts - Part 1: Fences

Every wargamer has lots of it: Sprues from your miniatures. Most of the time they are just thrown away but i thought of trying to use them to make some cheap terrain. A quick search on google just gave me some inspiration and I tried to make something out of the material lying arround:

Needed material:

• some spare sprues (obviously)
• MDF or thick cardboard
• sand
• white glue
• paint
• static gras
• a cutter and some brushes

Step 1 - Carving the wood

Cut the sprues in approximatly equaly long parts. Then the fun part begins: Carve some unequal wood-like structure in the plastic sticks. In this step i cut one long stick in 4 smaller ones. If you are satisfied with the structure of the future wood, continue with step 2.

Step 2 - Glue everything together

Cut out a regular base out of your cardboard or MDF (I don't know what its called in english). I use a spare back board from a broken locker to cut out the bases. Then arrange the shorter sticks into some kind of cross where the long one can rest one. Let it completly dry before going on.

The carved sprues glued on their base

Step 3 - Basecoat and base decoration

Now follows business as usual: Basecoat the whole thing in a color of your choice and apply the sand onto the base. I tried to make a mushroom out of a clipped of head from a nail and glued it to the base. If the basecoat is dry, paint the sand in the color of your gaming table and the wooden parts in a brown color of your choice.

The basecoated fence

Step 4 - Finish him!

In this step just drybrush everything in lighter and lighter colors. If the wooden structure does not come out like you want, just highlight the edges by hand. I also painted my test mushroom and applied some static gras.

Finished fence from sprues

Conclusion

It's pretty easy to make something out of this junk sprues. I am very pleased with the result and I will definitly make some more terrain parts out of sprue.