Foam Carving a Mountain for Diorama/Wargaming

so how do you go from this to this let's find out [Music] hello welcome to breath of life development my name is josh foreman and today we are turning this kind of foam into cool rock-tacular cliffs and mountains and stuff now why would you want to do this the answer is simple you have a war game that you're putting on or maybe you have a sculpture that would make a nice base or backdrop for it or you're just making cool dioramas there are lots of reasons to carve beautiful rocks and this is just a great material for it now quick little uh side-by-side comparison here when you hear about styrofoam you're probably thinking about this stuff that you get in packaging this is not what we're using this kind of stuff this foamular is called xps foam not to be confused with exp foam that's what you get when you fight a war game on the foam no xps is i don't know it's made for insulation for houses and buildings and stuff but it just happens to have lots of really cool properties that lets it chip and carve in ways that are very reminiscent of rock now as a quick caveat i want to point out that i do not have a ton of experience doing terrain stuff uh i have some experience most of my two decades of making art professionally we're making landscapes but virtual for video games right so i think i bring some kind of unique perspective to it but if you want to see specific like masters at their craft doing this kind of thing that i'm about to partake in check out my buddy neil at real terrain hobbies he does amazing very inspirational work he's one of the reasons that i really felt like i should get into dioramas more for my channel i patreon him he patreons me we have a grand old time other great people to check out would be blackmagic crafts luke tauwen has just incredible dioramas so i'm going to put the links down there if you want to check out other people that are doing this kind of thing you know you can see what my results are and judge for yourself if you want to follow along or not as a result of my relative lack of experience with this exact medium this tutorial is going to be very kind of touchy-feely i'm not going to be like giving you steps one two three four it's really a lot of back and forth between the steps and i think really that's actually the biggest takeaway from this project is that this medium is so kind of easy to work with that it's very uh optimized so that you can go from a base coat back to carving back to a base coat to a wash back to carving sanding after that a base coat again there's just like it's so organic it's really great it's free flowing it's fun i hope you enjoy this process real quick please drop me a like and subscribe i'm going to be doing more of this kind of terrain and diorama type stuff in the future so if that's your bag please please come hang out we're going to be doing more of this and i'll be getting better and probably get to that point where i can give you guys very step-by-step process videos but in the meantime uh let's let's just dive right in so we're starting with blocking this thing out now if i was going to rank the order of importance when it comes to the procedure for making creative projects like this number one would be always use reference find something that looks at least a little bit like what you're working on having a connection to the real world is just massively important to selling your idea and the second most important thing is to spend enough time working out the foundational fundamental composition of your piece this is something that i think is undervalued quite a bit a lot of people just want to power through and get right to the fun detail part and that is just not the right way to go something that has stuck with me for a long time i have a friend jordu who does special effects creature design stuff like that in hollywood and he was on a tv show called making monsters about it i don't know a decade ago and he was talking about how if it was up to him and he had to choose you know say you have a master and an apprentice if the master is going to work on either the composition or the details he would rather have the master do the composition and then the apprentice doing the details because no amount of details is going to solve for wonky composition and so the important thing is spend time on this don't be afraid to build a certain thing and then tear it back and then build onto it again and tear it away this is an experimental phase and getting this composition right is very important now i'm using some caulking here which is completely unnecessary i just had it laying around and figured i might as well use it you can use hot glue and as you can see tape really the thing that's holding this together the most are these barbecue skewers that i'm uh coating with hot glue and then pounding into place the great thing about xps as a medium is that it's so light that the structural integrity is not something that is super difficult to deal with hot glue and little wood skewers is really all you need also on this project i'm kind of keeping myself to simply using knives to cut it up you can use foam cutters and stuff like that but i just wanted to demonstrate that it's not necessary there's several ways to build up a mountain rock form you can layer your foam in just flat layers and kind of shape each one as they progressively go up i enjoy this method where i'm putting them at all these odd angles just because i think it introduces a little bit of creative chaos into the process it makes the rocks go into shapes that i may not have expected i'm just cutting some randomly shaped pieces and finding ways to glue them together and then filling the gaps between them what i'm doing here is a little trick i thought of and i just don't recommend doing it i'm not going to do it myself anymore i thought that because i often have trouble getting black into all the little nooks and crannies that if i painted around the edges where i knew parts would be budding together if i pre-painted them with black then i wouldn't have to worry about getting into the cracks it turns out this is more trouble than it's worth and it actually makes it more difficult to work out the composition and i think the overall piece suffered a bit because of this so here i've got kind of a flow line and a natural cleft in the rock and so as i'm carving i'm trying to keep that flow in mind and working the edges down towards that line now i'm being a little fluid here in that i'm bouncing between steps one and two step one being getting the overall form and composition the way i like it and step two being to start introducing the secondary forms you know the more individual clefs of rock and such this medium just lends itself to being able to be very fluid in that way so i do feel like some of the secondary cracks and and the way the stone shears and stuff feeds back into the overall form of the composition so it's good to play back and forth what i'm trying not to do specifically is go to step three which is starting to get the fiddly little details in and speaking of fiddly little details let's hop right in and i'm just going to give you a quick demonstration of what i'm going to be doing over most of the surface of this rock this is another thing i did that i think kind of came back to bite me i do not recommend what i'm doing right now which is carving details on a little piece and then trying to work that back into the overall composition it's much better to have your composition in place and then pull off the parts and detail them but regardless here's an opportunity to show some of the characteristics of this medium and how to get cool rocky textures on it so the first thing you'll notice is that i bounce between different blades here and there one thing i did was i went to a second-hand store and just bought a bunch of crappy old used knives so i like to mix it up and bounce between different types of blades different sharpness uh whether it's serrated the size of the blade that sort of thing they all just give you subtly different effects and so this is one of those things where you just spend some time hacking away at foam until you get a feel for it so here's an example of how a dollar knife will tend to tear as it cuts which is not a good thing or a bad thing it's just a different kind of effect in some places it works great and in other places uh not so great so you'll notice this maneuver that i do quite a bit which is where i slice the blade in a bit and then i rotate the blade with which kind of chips a chunk off and because of the nature of this xps foam it just kind of it naturally shears very much like a rock it's almost like napping a rock this is one of the reasons why this is a preferred medium for making these kind of rocks rather than the normal kind of styrofoam that you might be used to here's another fun technique where you can slice this one you do kind of want to use a sharper blade you can slice in these little layers like this which gives the impression of a sedimentary rock that has flaked away one layer after another [Music] [Applause] [Music] now as i'm gouging out this area here i'm creating lots of little bits little detritus of foam and that's um usually not something that you want to have embedded in your cracks like that i'm going to get back to that [Music] sometimes when i start to see general shapes and forms emerging from the chaos that i'm doing by just jabbing it in random places it helps to just draw out the shape that you want on the rock and then you could use that as a rough guide i'm also thinking about the cross fractures that occur and just kind of sketching those out as well [Music] oh getting back to what i was saying about the sharp blade versus the dole blade here's a look that i just this is kind of how i started when i was doing foam working and i really don't like it it is it you know it's stylized you could say but i'm going for realism with this piece so it's just doesn't work for what i'm doing however you can still start with it and rough it up like this you can see just dragging your blade over an area repeatedly gives you a lot of really interesting sort of chips and gashes [Music] so besides cutting with the blade you can also use sandpaper that's a totally valid way to shape things uh i do want to show you something though this is what it's like to sand before it's painted it smooths things out a bit but it also creates little dog ears little flaps that you're going to have to deal with later you would want to use this smooth sanding feel for areas that are particularly weathered that have seen a lot of rain and wind [Music] okay here's another thing you need to keep in mind when you make a big gash like i have here you have to keep in mind this is three dimensional not two dimensional so make sure that you're putting your details in on that face as well so if there's a fracture in the rock you know where two parts are joining they're going to continue along that face on the inside there [Music] and here's another way to do little cracks and stuff is a fine sharpie pin gives you a bit of a different look and remember rule one reference reference reference it's so helpful it keeps you from doing this kind of thing which i see all the time when you don't have reference you kind of go with what's in your brain and what's in your brain is usually a cartoon version of reality and so you end up with cracks like this rocks just don't crack like that i mean okay sure i'm sure you can find some exception somewhere but for the most part you're not going to see that kind of weird lightning bolt cartoon crack in a real rock [Music] another thing this reference is helping me realize is that it's not just one surface that has these cracks that are completely equal across it there are deeper parts where the weathering has made the face of the rock be inset from the rest of the face [Music] okay now just for demonstration purpose i'm going to do a base coat on this and a little bit of dry brushing just so you get a sense for how all these techniques come together in the end i am using flat black latex house paint just i went to the hardware store i said whatever is the cheapest black paint you have that's flat give me that i'm dabbing away the excess with a paper towel just because i'm about to short cut and dry brush it anyway so it really doesn't matter that some of the pink may show through and i simply mixed a little bit of white paint in with the black house paint to do this layer okay and here you see the most dreaded enemy of foam carving i'm gonna call them flappy doodles yeah they're flappy doodles and i hate them i hate them so much there's two methods to deal with them one is to hunt them down individually as i'm showing here and just slice them off and the other is sanding and we'll talk more about that in a little bit okay and here you see me breaking my own rule about composition because i went in and made all this detail on this rock now i'm trying to find a way to fit it in and make the composition conform to the detail that i've already created and that is the opposite of what you want to do [Music] but that did remind me hey i should start thinking more clearly about the composition again and so here i am just painting in some dark lines to give a sense of flow to the overall rock that will help me make better decisions about how i add more mass or carve away areas as i proceed [Music] here is a great example showing that when you sand when you try to sand away the flappy noodles quite often you end up making more smaller flappy doodles which is maybe progress here's another thing to keep in mind compositionally speaking is that especially on craggy rocks like this it's really helpful to have some areas of rest of visual rest where you have because you have so much texture and visual noise happening having smoother broad open areas just really helps bring some variety and also helps guide your eye in the way you want it to travel across the piece so i'm just kind of picking out these spots here to be my rest area and that doesn't mean that zero detail goes there it just means that i'm trying to keep the areas smoother overall [Music] having a little air duster thing is really helpful for getting rid of the detritus that you're carving and so here we have it base coated again this is simply with the house paint and here we've got more flappy doodles to deal with i hate these i hate them so much [Music] this is an area where i feel like when i pulled up the foam the knife was so dull that it did more tearing than slicing and it just doesn't look convincing to me so i'm flattening that out a bit but an important point here is that you should feel like your first base coat is not the next step and then you go to more dry brushing or whatever you should feel like this is sort of a sanity check you're looking at the full thing and then you're making revisions and then you're going to do another base coat now i feel like these areas need a little something and this is where using a little smasher is nice helps it it really does give sort of a fractured rock feel and you can use anything for this anything hard you know here's i'm using just the base of my knife works just fine i made this little tool by rolling gravel into some epoxy clay we've got a class on epoxy clay if you want to check that out this is another one that's just sand instead of the gravel now i don't like this horseshoe shape in here it's kind of repeated so it gives it that artificial look so i'm going to break up that shape with some cuts here and there and so here we are back at the bane of my existence the flappy doodles but here's the cool thing after you get a base coat on there when you sand them away you get far fewer uh micro flappy doodles i think the paint is sort of holding them or rooting them in place and so when you sand them away it's not pulling up more material around them okay time for the next coat now in this case i'm just using mod podge mixed with black paint and that works generally pretty good as a base coat but this is was such a large project i didn't bother with this as the base coat i just used the plain house paint uh for this next layer i'm going with mod podge it gives you a harder surface a little bit of a shell of protection around your foam mixing in some plain white acrylic to it now i'm not mentioning ratios because i do this very free form it's just i want it to be a bit lighter right so i'm mixing it until it looks a bit lighter i like using these makeup brushes for my this isn't quite a dry brush but it is a you know i'm not trying to soak everything i'm just hitting the surfaces with it so that brush works really well and again i want to emphasize this is so important after you do another coat you are still completely fine to go in and make revisions i thought this area looked a little too cartoony so i'm adding more stuff to it [Music] okay now we're going to modulate the tone of the gray i've got all these various colors very random assortment of paints as long as they're acrylics or inks they're going to work fine for this uh and using cheap stuff totally fine you can see i've got just some craft paint some regular acrylic paints some airbrush paint doesn't matter as long as it is water-based it'll work and i just mix them in a cup with a bunch of water and get it on a stiff brush and just sort of spatter it around and it's fine to be super sloppy with this it really doesn't matter at this point i'm mixing in some of that gray mod podge coat that i had and it's picking up that yellow and just smearing it around a bit if things get too out of control you just cover them up with the gray again it's fine uh here's a spot where i've got a big drippy drop look just plop up it's fine [Music] you could smear with your fingers uh you could use paper towels sponges really anything to just give some variation to the surface [Music] if you're looking at reference you'll see that cliffs and rocks have a ton of color variation in them that you just don't expect okay now it's time to do a little bit of dry brushing in this case i don't even know if this counts as dry brushing this is more like medium brushing i'm just getting a yet lighter color again ratio doesn't matter it's just whatever makes it pop out a little bit more and i'm following the contours of the composition and making sure that the lightest spots are following those lines because i'm in a rush i'm just going to blow dry this so i can go right to the next step now i'm using a matte clear coat because the next layers that i want to do i want to be able to sort of apply and remove them without removing the paint underneath this particular brand is army painter anti-shine and i love this stuff it's kind of spindy you don't need to use this as long as you have some kind of matte varnish or even a semi-gloss varnish should work fine okay here i'm mixing just some black paint and water with a few drops of dish detergent to help it flow and again not caught up on the ratios at all the point is that i just want it to be runny [Music] i mixed in a little bit of brown as well so that it has some kind of interest it's not purely black and white you can kind of see it on the edge there always test things out on the back to dial your settings in you can see there's hardly an art to this i'm just spritzing and dabbing i'm especially going in and being really aggressive around the cracks and crevices now in some places i'm dabbing harder than others i want some of these little droplets to kind of stick stick around [Music] it's always great when your run-off can actually look like weathering that you know gravity would pull stains down the face of the rock but there is one thing that i always kind of look out for which is when droplets form that are you know there's rivlets that are equally width these are different enough that i'm pretty happy with them though you can see they fade off pretty severely because the paint is so watered down so it just means doing it multiple times in multiple layers and that works great gives it a more natural look again going for more of a spattering look which again because it's so watery it fades in here's an example of droplets that are kind of hitting a dead end and they just stop in this sort of drop u-shape and that is something you want to avoid because that gives away the scale when you see the the water drop shapes it's the same reason that water is really hard to make look you know miniature now i'm going in with a lot browner spray gives it sort of a rusty feel [Music] not everywhere just in some places and now i'm going to do probably i would say the penultimate dry brushing and one thing that i do is i use a smaller brush this actually forces me to think more carefully about where i want to dry brush it's okay here here's another kind of compositional thing to keep in mind if you make every area special then no area is special so think about that when you're dry brushing it's so tempting to just blom over the entire thing because dry brushing is so fun and you see all these details just popping out and emerging it's wonderful right but try to constrain it try to think compositionally about where you want highlights and where you want the eye to travel over the piece here's an example of two droplets right next to each other that kind of give again i think they give that the scale away a bit so i want one or more of them to be washed out and because i did that clear coat i'm free to just kind of scrub and scrape at them but also i'm free to cover them with other details so here i am going in with another spatter pass with some white not pure white but you know light gray again dry brushing oh and i want to point out this dry brushing is still nowhere close to white it's just light enough to make those highlights pop out you almost never want to dry brush with pure white now i'm using kind of a ochrish yellowish brownish to bring in some more color variation using a little spritzer bottle here that i think i got it at the dollar store you can see how different the colors and tones on rock faces are so i'm trying to capture that now i'm going in with some a little bit of more white misty [Music] spray [Music] now to be honest i'm not sure why i went over this with a medium gray again i think maybe i was feeling the colors were popping a little too much but as you can see i came back and add more later so this is just a great illustration of the fact that this is one of those things where you can pop back and forth between the stages as much as you want and every time you do it you're bringing a little more depth and life to the rock [Music] now here's a real rock that i got from my yard you can see it's got some really great liking growth on it oh and just kidding it's not a real rock this was a sample that i'm doing to try to get the look that i'm going for [Music] this was a technique that i developed for the colossus that this mountain is actually going to be a background for you can check out those videos here [Music] but lichen is just a really cool thing and it's fun to try to reproduce um so this is what i came up with you don't need to spritz you could use a paintbrush but i just happen to have this color in my spritz bottle and then i use 99 isopropyl alcohol and just completely deluge the area and what that does is it spreads out the little particulates in the paint and redistributes them in a more natural way and you could do the alcohol first as well you get slightly different effects whether you go alcohol first and then paint or paint and then alcohol [Music] so fun fact lycan is actually a composite organism it's a mix of algae that actually gets the sunlight to create the energy but it grows on the filaments of fungi and so they it's like a symbiotic species that works together and you can see they come in all sorts of crazy colors [Music] but yeah the colors i see the most is sort of this mustardy yellow mixed with some whitish gray now i was applying this around the mountain i was having a real hard time with the composition now when you look at reference of cliffs that have this stuff this growth all over them they look really interesting and weird but whenever i try to apply it to this particular mountain it just looks wrong and i don't know i i just couldn't find a good way to make it not look like polka dots so i ended up knocking it back quite a bit [Music] but as i'm looking at the reference one of my primary value references was this mountain in china and i'm trying to figure out how to get that same amount of difference in modulations there's very dark areas and very light areas so i'm going in adding some more darks [Music] again here i'm just using my dabbing towel as sort of a mask to try to get some interesting contrast you know one area is very dark right next to a less dark area [Music] okay so i feel like got the mid values and the dark values pretty well but not the light yet so i'm going in with a pretty light gray compared to the rest again this is nowhere near white it may look white in comparison but really it's probably i don't know 30 or 40 gray [Music] and i have very little pigment on my brush but i'm brushing it a lot to try to fill in most of the mid areas not just hit the highlights so yeah i've got these dark sort of spot areas but i'm going to punch them up a little bit more i feel like it could use even more contrast i keep looking at that reference here i just want to point out how cool these hammer smashes ended up looking i love that i don't know those are the stars of the show for me rock stars if you will [Music] this area turned out really great too are some of the browns and blacks mixed together [Music] okay now i'm going to hit some spots with a satin varnish what this does is it brings a little bit of reflection to the rock one of the things this does is bring in yet another layer of variety to the rock so that as you see it at different angles some of the faces will glint a little more than others in the light and i ended up doing this over i don't know maybe 10 or 20 percent of the rock faces yeah so there you go overall i'm pretty happy with it you know there are things that i will definitely improve on the next go round if you guys like this and find this aspirational and want to do it hey please share this around to various builder and hobby and terrain groups on the reddits and the you know you know the places where you guys congregate i would really appreciate it i want to get some traction going in this direction for my channel so i love all of uh those communities to come hang out with me from time to time so uh let's talk about what i feel like isn't perfect and what i'm going to try to try to work on next time um so number one uh the flow of things are you know as i pointed out as i was building it putting in these little sections here really uh because i carved them first and then i glued them on and then i tried to work the uh the flow of the stone around it i don't think that really quite worked it has a bit of a stilted overly jumbly feel to it it doesn't feel like the way rock actually kind of erodes and falls away and stuff like that as a result i feel like it's just kind of a bit stilted a bit wonky stair-steppy um which sometimes could work but in this particular case i feel like it just didn't it didn't do what i had in my head you know that's that's a really typical thing uh for all artists so i don't feel horrible about it there's a few sections like up here where the knife did that that thing where it tears triangles into it and it just does it in a repetitive pattern along a stripe and that just that just kind of jumps out at me is a little bit unnatural the things that i really do like i think the areas of rest that i talked about i think those worked out great there's a pretty healthy variety of face types in here you've got the smooth weathered you know open ones you've got the crinkly noisy ones you've got this one that looks kind of like accreted conglomerates up there so yeah i've got a little hint that's sort of an arch that's eroded away underneath so overall i feel like it's got a good variety i think the coloring turned out pretty well uh i probably could have pushed it further looking at my reference again but i do think my biggest takeaway is next time compose the entire thing first don't put any black coloring on it just get the whole thing uh formed and get the flow established and then i could start pulling chunks away carve on them and stick them back uh whatever i feel like i can't just carve directly onto the rock face now for those of you who are new to the channel and don't realize it i have this massive series where i build this shadow of the colossus this is just his head his body is kind of disassembled right now and this piece is actually going to be part of a massive diorama that he's going to be standing in for the final sort of photo shoot and stuff uh so this is uh like a small corner this is maybe five percent of the whole project for the backdrop so it's going to be really interesting uh next video that i do on on this kind of diorama work i'm going to be working on the one sec on these kind of ruined pieces you can see them in the game footage here these are the walls that he kind of kicks over to get to uh your character wanders he's running away so it's going to be a big exciting project i hope you guys will stick around and watch me go through that learning process as well there's lots of other interesting things when it comes to making ruins and stuff that i think is going to be going to be pretty interesting so yes hang out we've got the discord we've got the facebook we've got the twitter we've got the instagram we've got is that enough things that's enough things right i feel like that's enough things uh thanks to all my patrons i also post every week on my patreon where i give behind the scenes uh updates progress on how things are going and you get your name in the credits and for the the 10 and up you get a special factoid about yourself and who doesn't want a special factoid made up by some random artist dude i mean is there anything better [Music] [Music] [Music] bye

Channel: Josh Foreman

Views: 59,246

Keywords: Diorama, diorama tutorial, realistic rocks, model train layout, fake mountain, foam carving, terrain, terrain carving, art tutorial, craft tutorial, xps foam terrain, xps foam diorama, wargaming, wargaming terrain, wargaming terrain building, josh foreman, sculpting, terrain sculpting, mountain, foam

Id: I1RciOqw07s

Length: 41min 11sec (2471 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021