Other Techniques - Sand

You may have noticed that sand is a rather cheap commodity, this in contrast to many other model building materials. I have been experimenting a bit with sand as a building material, in combination with diluted white wood glue.

Usually, I sculpt terrain features out of plaster, but the problem is that any damage shows right away as an ugly white spot.  So, I tried sand. I used 10% wood glue in water, and mixed just enough through the sand to make it workable. Think back to your sandbox days, and you will know what I mean. The result is very hard, much harder than plaster, with a nice texture. This cave entrance still needs basing on a dead CD and painting, but it shows exactly what I mean.

So, I tried something different. In stead of casting my bricks with plaster I decided to give sand a try. I filled the tile mold with dry sand, and then dripped my white glue solution on it till it was saturated. The drawback is the long drying time, a week is minimum, but the results are very nice. The tiles are rock hard and have a shiny surface, a nice contrast to the plaster ones that you see on the left.

I will use these sand tiles for a small hall in my dungeon system. After these two experiments, I also used this sand and glue for a group of trees based again on a CD, this piece of scenery also still needs finishing. The only problem encountered here was that the wood and sand combination doesn't adhere well to the CD, but some contact glue will remedy that.

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