For the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking about a display board that would fit inside my Photography Lightbox to give my miniatures a realistic background.

I decided to bite the bullet and dive in. This process should work for you if you want to do the same thing or if you just want to make a display board for your models.

List of Materials Used

1. MDF Board (I used 6mm thick board)
2. Some wood off cuts to act as braces (I used the wooden parts of an old canvas picture)
3. Wood glue and pin head nails
4. Some High Density Foam board (I picked mine up from Amazon – affiliate link, but I’m sure there are cheaper places to find it).
5. Some Mod Podge (this stuff is great, and acts as both a sealant for your work and a glue to stick your materials down). Here’s an Amazon affiliate link.
6. A craft knife

The first step involved measuring the internal size of the photography box I was designing the scene for. I then cut the MDF boards to size for two sides of the scene (note: as a note for those looking to do this, I actually regret not building the third side for this as I still have to hold the camera at an angle to remove the exposed side).

These boards were stuck together with wood glue using the older canvas frame I repurposed to brace them. These were then fastened a little more using pin head nails. I used miniature clamps to hold everything in place while it dried.

Once the wood glue had dried I cut some larger curved sections from the high density foamboard to build up the hills at the back of the scene. Note that these are very rough and don’t need to be precise at this point as I carved into them later for the rocky effects.

I’ve not listed magnetic sheets in the materials, but I added this myself as I thought it may be useful if I wanted to place magnets underneath the bases of miniatures to keep them in place. With the amount of basing materials I then applied, this turned out to be ineffective – but I’ve included it to show everything I did and to show you what to avoid.

Using a craft knife (note: A hot wire cutter would be better here, but if not, use a cheap knife as this stuff will blunt your knife really quickly) I carved features into the face of the cliff to try and make it look ‘rocky’.

After I’d finished the carving and sculpting of the HDF I applied some larger rocks to the base of the cliffs using PVA.

To prevent the base of the cliff face appearing to be very flat, I applied a layer of sand over PVA to create some surface near the foot of the cliff.

Once all those stones and sand had dried, I covered the whole scene with Mod Podge. This stuff will seal your HDF so that you can spray it with paint (HDF will often melt with the various chemicals etc that are in spray paints).

The mod podge took about 24 hours to dry completely, at which point I sprayed the scene black and the background with Nocturne Green from GW. The intention here was for any gaps in the trees etc to appear as dark green hoping to give the impression of the scene stretching off into the distance.

I then painted the cliff rocks with a medium grey, slowly applying more white and drybrushing lighter shades over the top.

Once the grey paints had dried, I then applied a series of washes in various colours (thinned down) to the rocks to give them a little more depth.

Mixing some brown paint with fine sand I based the scene and the top of each level of the cliffs with this mixture. I then drybrushed this with a lighter brown. (Note: You could use Stirland Mud, but this is a lot more expensive).

Then the fun stuff! I used my mod podge (as its a PVA) and covered each level. I then used a mix of Geek Gaming basing materials and static grass to cover the whole scene and give it the realistic looking field effects. It was at this point I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw it coming together.

I bought a few trees and bushes from Woodland Scenics and glued them to the scene and applied my basing materials once more across the trees bases. I also glued down some static graft tufts and flowers to add a little bit more detail to the scene.

Once it was dry, it was good to go!

I hope this helps you all, and if you do make your own, send me a picture so I can see the results!