I most likely didn't spell Apsens right but you get the picture. After seeing another tutoral here on making real rocks look like modeled rocks done by Slash, I figured minds well share my ways of making fake rocks look like real rocks. And while we're at well learn how to make some cool wintery Aspen trees.
The final product Or something like that.
Materials Pink or Blue insulation foam
A dull steak knife
Dark and light brown paints
Floral pieces(Ill get specifics later)
Masking tape 1) The pink brick
What you really want to do is go to home depot and buy a slab of pink foam. This stuff is about 15 for a 2'*8' piece and believe me that goes a long way and can be used for everything. Then cut out roughly the shape and size you want for your rocky outcropping. Making several small irrregual shaped ones can really add alot of depth and straegy to a gaming board or jsut your kitchen table. For the demo Ill start out with a small square block.
2) Stabby, Stabby
Next find a knife what you suspect you or your mom wont be using any time soon. Try and keep this knife by your side from now on as your modeling knife. Start by shaving off the sharp egdes on top to give the block a less harsh look. Then comes the fun part. Randomly goudge out and stab the block to rip out odd shaped chunks. It helps if most of these are in the same direction but hey its your rock. Then jsut slice the block repeatedly horizontally, varing the placement and angle of the slices. *Heres why you want a not so sharp knife, its easy to slice yourself while doing this so BE VERY CAREFULL. Put the rock down and put some figures around it, change anything you dont like about the rock now. If it helps look at some real rocks for referance. This can be rather messy so just be perpared to clean eveything up later. For the demo rock I didnt do anything that crazy just your simple rock face.
3) Bust'n out the Paints
Now for the fun and even dirtier part. Your best bet is to go to your local arts store like Michaels and buy some crappy quality paints for this. I suggest one big bottle of Americana Maple Brown for your base and a smaller bottle of Bittersweet Chocolate. Watering down the maple paint will help with coverage and effects on the rocks but dont over do it, just a little water added in every so often will work wonders. Useing a big brush just paint up the rock with the maple color or any other medium brown. Then with out rinseing your brush use he bittersweet choclate and really ram it into the slashes and grouges you made earlier. You always want the resesed area to be a darker color. And while your at it mix some dark brown around on the surface to give it soem naterual variation. By now the brick looks like crap but that just how its supposed to look, later steps make it look awsome.
*Opinional Step- The top of the rock formation can at this point in time either be painted like thd rest of the foam or you can use white glue and glue down some dirt. Dirt is easy to get from your backyard but I suggest a small bag of medium grade concrete crushed stone. This will provide you with all shapes and sizes of rocks from dust to slate and miniture bolders. Take a good sized cup of what ever dirt you want and then put it on a cookie sheet and bake it in the oven fro 20 minutes. This will kill anyhting that was living in the dirt and your good to go. After the glue holding the dirt down ontop of the rock dries, just paint it up like the rest of the rock. This picture of the demo rock was taken before I used the optional step, but I did use dirt to add texture to the top of the demo as seen in later pictures.
And that concludes the first part of the tutorial on how to make rocks and Aspens. This is cause Im still waiting for certain parts of the next part to dry. Stay tuned for next time when we finish painting our fake rocks and make some trees.
