The Sands of Istvaan 5 (1)

Me and some buddies are planning to run through all three of the Istvasan campaigns in the Horus Heresy books, probably at the beginning of next year. Although i have a sizeable Death Guard force, the others are still building their armies. In the meantime, I've set about preparing the battlefields!

All three of the campaigns are set on the red sands of Istvaan 5; the initial assault buy the Loyalists, the ensuing massacre, and then the hunt for the loyalists survivors. This makes terrain building a fairly simple matter, with one terrain set being applied to all three campaigns. This being the case, i started with something simple: rocks!!

For these i used a plywood base cut to size. Then I used spray on cavity insulation straight onto the wood base. Now this is an expanding foam, so the amount applied was only about 2/3 of the final size. As you can see below, its not very rock-like at the moment, but this is going to provide the raw structure and shape of the rocks. This one was build over two layers to achieve the height.

Once dry (2hrs for a good set) I started carving out basic rocky shapes into the foam. I used a saw for this which was much easier than using a scalpel (the ones shown below are not the same as the one above FYI)

The shapes of the foam gives a nice texture to the rocks, making for a more natural looking formation. Adding the sand adds additional texture.

Some more examples of the natural texture of the foam.

So far i have these three rock formations done and ready for painting. The colour will require a little thought in order to achieve the right shade of red, but the HH books should help me with that.

I have a lot more formations to finish! The ones here are much larger than the ones above. I also have plans to make some formations with integrated fortifications to represent the Traitors emplacements prior to the Loyalist assault!

I'm very excited about this project - it's really going to bring 30K to life!

The GunGrave