Feb 29

Covering Foam Surface Tutorial

Mordheim Construction,Terrain Tips
Author: Ashton Sanders

As promised, here’s a little tutorial of how I used Spackle to cover Styrofoam and packing foam surface.

The Problem: If you have ever made anything out of the Styrofoam that comes packed around store-bought products (or seen it for that matter), you probably have noticed that the surface is definitely not smooth. Since it was made with little, round foam bubbles, the surface has lots of little bumps and gaps. If you are unfamiliar with this surface, you probably won’t need to read this tutorial. Here is a picture of Styrofoam with a base paint of black so you can see the surface:

Foam Surface

As you can tell, this doesn’t look like the wall of a building in my city of Mordheim, or whatever you are looking to do with it. It looks more like a piece of packing foam painted black.

The Solution: There are many different solutions to this problem. One solution is to use many coats of thick paint to fill the gaps and smooth it over. Another is to mix glue into your paint to make it thicker. My personal favorite now is Spackle:

Spackle for Foam or Packing Foam

Foam Covered in Spackle

With Spackle you get to choose how you want your wall to look. You can create nice smooth walls or give your wall a lot of texture. In the above picture, I have a very thin layer of Spackle. In the picture above, the Spackle on the top left is too thin, but it came out fine everywhere else.

Here’s an image of the Styrofoam surface after I have let it dry, and painted it black. (The blue hue is from the lighting)

Spackle Covered Foam

Yeay! I have created a wall with just a little bit of texture. If you are looking for more texture, Spackle will allow you to do that too. This is the Spackle I used with the tool I used to apply it:

Light-weight foam spackle

I hope this helps to create nice, textured miniature buildings and walls for all of your miniature needs.
-Ashton Sanders

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Tags: bubbles, building, Foam, gaps, Mordheim, Mordheim Terrain, Painting, Styrofoam, texture, walls,

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