Terrain Q&A

After watching Col. Flagg's videos & hearing him mentioned the difficulties he encountered @ his first attampt at using the dense construction foamboard (pink/blue foam).

I thought it would be good to include a disscussion on Terrain, Scenery & modeling projects we have questions on.
Or any tips we have learned in our own trial & error methods.

I'll startus off with some general tips on working with foamboard.

ALWAYS have a SHARP BLADE!!!
Foam has a habit of dulling a blade quickly. Not enough to matter on other modeling projects just foamboard & foamcore.
I have gotten into the habit of including a sharpening stone in my tool kit just in case.

foam board does not do well with any solvent based items and tends to melt.
(Superglue, Spray paint, paint thinner, etc.) However these can be used to get some desired results for other techniques.

The best glue to use (durable & cost effective) is simple PVA (Elmers glue) the only drawback is drying time.
If your pressed for time &/or have more money on hand Liquid Nails construction adhesive works great! And if you working on a large terrain prodject or building a titan from scratch then this is a must due to its durability (load up a caulking gun & go to town)
Now, they do make on specifically for foamboard but I have seen no real differences between them.

I have recently been introduced to hot glue guns as a viable solution for foam & scenery in general. I had always considered them in use with certain plastics but not with foam.
I was surprised at the results.
Now for quality results (competition level) it does require a fair amount of attention to clean-up and smoothing of the glue beads before hardening.

for texturing foamboard I use aggresive tools with a light touch.
I've used sand paper, wire brushes and Demel tools to gouge, scrape, smooth, carve and mangle foamboard.
Spray paint and other solvents will give a melted look to varying degrees.
A neat trick I learned is getting a stenciled look with foam.
you cut out a stencil of the image you want in the foam (think pumpkin stencil). PIN it to the foam (tape & glue will leave marks). cover ALL areas of the foam you dont want affected. Then hit the stencil with short burst of spray paint until you get the desired depth.
Remove the stencil & let it harden back up. After that you can use an Exacto blade to clean up the edges.
prime the whole thing (I use flat house paint or any brush on acrylic.) and you're good to go.

I found the best knives to cut foam with is the cheap doller store retracter knives. once they get dull just throw them out. they also have a longer blade then hobby knives.

If your careful you could paint super glue symbols (like chaos star) into the foam. also as said above you could spray paint stuff into it aswell.

for texture on a small scale if you want it to look like a rock simply find a real corse rock and press it into the foam.

Not bad Flagg you got some good suggestions there. Also melted and slagged effects are a good reason to spray the foam etc.