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Help me Dakka hive-mind!

I'm looking to spruce up the home table experience and get cracking on some terrain. Can anyone give me some good starting out tips or some links to good tutorials/articles?

I know it's not too difficult to use found objects, but I'd be keen to learn about some particularly effective hacks that some more experienced hands might know.

cork mats are your best friend, sand, pva glue and poly filler also.

Terra Genesis has been around for a long time, and has collected a great many resources.

Also, feel free to browse my Scratch Build Blog here on DakkaDakka

Scratch built terrain can be made out of almost anything. Keep an eye out for interesting shapes, and little bits that would serve as detail pieces.

If you have an idea for a piece of terrain, mentally break it down into smaller shapes. Build, or find those shapes, and put them together, base them, add little details to spice it up, and then paint !!

Also, if you have Dollar Stores in your are, they are a great resource, for toys and cheap plastic containers for conversion.

My top tip is textured spray paint.

It comes in several colour ways and gives an instant stone or concrete finish with texture and multi-colour.

Make sure to protect foamcore board and expanded polystyrene from the raw spray by sealing it first with PVA glue or they melt from the solvents.

I think a short list of homemade terrain materials would be:

1. Utility knife. The cheap kind with the breakaway blades work great.
2. Foam brushes. Cheap and disposable.
3. A bag of construction sand. We want a coarse mix. Play sand is too uniform and fine.
4. A jug of wood glue.
5. A 4x6 sheet of 1" insulation foam.
6. Hardboard/MDF. The smaller 2x4 sheets are easier to store and work with.

This short list can be had at pretty much any hardware store and will last you years of terrain making. For painting terrain, I had a gallon of outdoor flat latex paint color-matched in a dark brown and then two 1-quart cans in a medium- and light-brown for drybrushing.

The only "specialty" supplies would be getting some green flock and some scale trees/foliage from your local hobby store. Beyond that, you can get as complicated or technical as you want.

This is where the halcyon days of Rogue Trader comes to mind. In the RT rulebook there was actually a whole section of the book devoted to scratchbuilding terrain and vehicles. Get yourself a large storage container and keep it to store things like:

Pringles cans
yogurt pots
odd shaped containers
interesting bits

Cheap kids toys do have some of the most interesting bits if you take them apart. Fun little gears and other oddly shaped bits of plastic. After a while, "The Madness" will set in and you will see uses for odd little items. Personally, I have a few containers of odd bits and I prefer to do all my terrain basing with thick plasticard. I found a place online and I can buy pre-cut sheets in bulk for a fraction of buying them locally. I essentially bought 3 8'x4' sheets of the plasticard cut down into 2'x2', 12"x12" and 6"x6" squares. Cost me less than 50 dollars and I have enough premade terrain bases for a long while.

[Edit]: Here's the link for the site I use: https://www.iplasticsupply.com/ . Look for high-impact styrene.

Whoa thanks everyone! This is a ton of good stuff to get me started

If you are one for putting more effort (rather than money) into your models. I will say that sprue, (those pieces of plastic your models often come attached to and are either building up in a pile somewhere in your house or have been thrown out) can be used to make all manner of items and details for terrain, as well as any model.

You can also use it to make the support structure for your other materials. Being polystyrene you can use poly' cement to glue it together and get a strong structure easily.

Or you can go all out and make the whole piece from sprue...
Not to blow my own trumpet, but my tutorial here on DDakka shows every step I used to build a "wooden" hut from mostly sprue. Even if you don't go this far, there should be various useful tips that you may find will help with any other builds.

Don't throw out your sprue, make something with it