If you play Frostgrave with Ulterior Motives, you’ll need a pit. If you play Rangers of Shadow Deep you’ll need some fly holes. I play both, so I decided to make some of these important holes in the ground.
For a fly hole or crater I started with a piece of 3mm PVC sheet and beveled the edges with a blade and sandpaper. I marked out the centre of the hole as a guide for the next step.
Next, I just plopped down a pile of Sculptamold around the edges. You can just as easily use a filler / joint compound, but Sculptamold has a nice lumpy texture that really works well for modelling earth.
A coat of textured paint, a base coat of dark brown, a black wash, and a tan dry brush, and its done. Well, except for a bit of static grass and fine turf for taste.
Next up is the pit. I started with a cardboard base and ran a line of hot glue around the central ring. For the top layer of the pit, I rolled out a piece of polymer clay (like Sculpey or Fimo) to about 2mm thick. I then used my Green Stuff World Cobblestone textured roller to lay that pattern onto the clay.
After 20 minutes in the oven, the clay will hardened, but is still flexible and easy to cut. I cut it down to shape and cut a hole in the middle. Then I hot glued it onto the cardboard base. That ring of hot glue I had put onto the cardboard earlier served to raise the centre of the clay ring.
One thing I’d like to point out is that the polymer clay will shrink slightly in the oven so roll it out and texture it, but don’t cut it to the shape you want until after it has been cooked.
I then cut the cardboard base to match the clay and beveled the edges with a blade. The final prep before painting was to fill the inside and outside edges of the clay with filler / joint compound.
For painting, I used a base coat of a medium grey. I then painted a few cobblestones a lighter grey, and some other cobblestones with a mix of light brown and medium grey. Once the paint dried, I slathered on a coat of black wash and finished off with a dry brush of cream.
