Rock formation

For building:

For painting:

Just cut the cardboard and glue one sheet over the other.

Once the glue dries up, you will have already finished the main structure.

Before painting, it would be nice to remove all holes on the sides and add some textures to make the terrain more interesting and less flat.

For that, paper and PVA glue are an easy and cheap technique.

On the first rock formation, I’ve added big pieces of paper, and mostly hid the fact that the rocks were layered, which was not what I actually wanted. But once I realized my mistake, the glue dried up.

For the second formation, I added smaller pieces of paper; in particular, I followed the layers made with the cardboard.

I needed a lot more time, too much, especially as reaching some cavities was not that simple. I also had to alternate on which layers to add the paper and glue, and wait until the glue dried up, otherwise I would move already positioned paper.

The final effect was more like what I had desired.

I suppose that a better approach, if you want to keep those layers visible, is to glue the paper on the sides of the cardboard and afterwards glue the cardboard together. This sequence makes it easier to glue the paper, and thus much faster, while gluing the cardboard together would take the same amount of time.

In part because the first rock did not look as I had wanted, I decided to make both of them gray, like most rocks on Earth, rather than the Martian red of Wadi Rum.

As for most terrain elements, I’ve used cheap acrylic colors instead of the costly ones made for painting the miniatures; in particular, the rock formations have big areas to be painted.

I’ve used a dark grey color as a base, and did not use a spray can, which would have simplified reaching some cavities for my second formation.

After that, I’ve used the dry-brush and semi-dry brush technique with lighter variants of grey for highlighting the details, and the paper did a terrific job.

My initial idea was to make something more similar to Wadi Rum; giant red rocks, eventually with some minerals or ancient cave paintings, similar to the one in the following picture:

I changed my mind after I saw how my first rock turned out. Plus, I was not confident that the paintings done by me would turn out well.

Since the rocks by themselves are not particularly interesting, I decided to add some ivy-like plants to add some other colors and details.

Adding the ivy, especially to the second formation, was harder than expected. I helped miself with some metal wire and rubber band to keep the trunks in place while the PVA glue dried up.

Since the PVA glue does not work as well on metal and plastic, removing afterwards the wires and rubber band was not an issue.

After that, as described here, I added the "leaves", highlighted some of them and finally finished the piece of terrain