Project Badlands

I cannot believe it has been over a year since I updated this blog. To be completely honest, I felt a bit hobbied-out. Games Workshop had been doing a massive shake-up of 40k, and frankly it was going in a direction I wasn't fond of. The rules had become a bloated mess of additional rules and random dice rolls for certain things, the rulebooks and codices were being shot out of development like a machine gun, and there were too many new kits being produced to keep up. It felt very overwhelming for me. I just felt burnt-out, but in January I painted up some Lord of the Rings figures and slowly began to rekindle the hobby fire.
Also, around this time my dad asked me to teach him 40k. To say its been slow-going would be an understatement. And to be honest, 40k has become such a rules-behemoth that there's plenty of things I don't even know, due to my lack of games. Putting it bluntly, it feels a bit like a chore to teach someone the game. I know we'll have a very long time before we reach a level where the games are fun, exciting, challenging or tactical.
But I decided to put in some effort at least. And I figured making some terrain would help. There's nothing better than fighting over a true battlefield. I've made a ton of terrain in the past, but its either gone unfinished, or reached a state I wasn't happy with. But with my latest project, I decided to go for something much simpler... desert terrain.
I've sat down and written up a long list of all the things I'd like to make for my terrain collection. Starting with rock piles and plateaus:

I began this project around March. The smaller pieces were created quite easily. They were made simply with random slabs cut out of 1" thick polystyrene. I shaved off most of the right-angle edges to make them look more natural, then coated them in a thin layer of plaster. When dry, I painted them. The top-most picture is of 2 hills I made out of 2" thick styrene, with cork bark glued around the edges to look like cliffs.
I've also made some larger plateaus, like the hills above, which can be used to create whole elevated positions to add some height variety to battles.
I'm currently working on fixing up and repainting some of my older terrain pieces, and also have some brand new and more exciting projects in the pipeline.
In addition, I recently visited some friends for a few days of hobby goodness. That really helped me get into gear when finishing off one of my armies. I'll take some piccies and make a post about that soon.