Making a plinth for use with your

Backdrops Book

In the Jon Hodgson Backdrops books we mention that there’s a guide to making a
scenic plinth to use with your backdrops on our website. And here it is!

In all of our own Backdrop Book photoshoots we boost up the model on a small
piece of scenery to more easily cut the bottom of the book out of shot. There’s
a guide to setting up your shots on the Handiwork Games website here, which
includes the use of just such a plinth.

In this article we’ll run through the initial steps of hand-making a plinth. We
should say in advance there are many, many ways to make such a thing. This
isn’t necessarily the best, or quickest way - it’s just how we do it. And you are
of course free to alter any of these steps, replacing any as you see fit, or doing
things in a different order. We find this way works well for beginners and is quite
inexpensive. It also makes a great project to try with younger gamers/modellers.
It’s a very forgiving technique.

2 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

Part One: Building
Things you’ll need for part one of this guide:

Tools: Materials:
• Pencil • Some scrap corrugated cardboard
• Scissors • Tissue paper, tissues or kitchen roll
• Hot glue gun (optional) • PVA glue
• A hammer (optional) • Hot glue sticks (optional)
• An old brush or two • Brown paint
• Water in a water pot • Grey paint
• Paint palette • Air-drying clay

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 3

Step Zero
We’ve added this step in retroactively to be super-smart,
and to get ahead of the schedule. This is something
to do the day before you start work in earnest. Take
some chunks of air drying clay and make some rough
boulder shapes. You can roll them into round boulders,
make some standing stone style rocks, some big ovals,
whatever you like. They don’t need to be anything
special - just rough chunks. Let them dry out.

After about 20 minutes to half an hour you can experiment with tearing some of
your boulders. If the air drying clay has dried out enough it creates some wild
textures.

Put that aside to dry thoroughly - preferably overnight. If you don’t have access to
air drying clay, you don’t have to add any rocks to your plinth. They do look nice
though.

Step One
First draw a rough oval on your cardboard as a guide. We tend to make something
this shape so that we can use it width ways and length ways in front of our
backdrop book, giving us more options from one plinth. This one is about 15cm
by 10cm.

4 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

Step Two
Cut it out. Cool cardboard potato, my friend.

Step Three
Draw around it four times on further scrap cardboard.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 5

Step Four
Cut them out. These steps are easy!

With 5 layers we have a plinth about 30mm high, which is about right for giving us
some tolerance in how much of it appears in our photos. If it’s too shallow it won’t
give us enough to work with in providing a foreground. If it’s too tall, it won’t be
as flexible to use, and we’ll need to jack up the backdrops book more than we
otherwise might need to. We find about 30mm - the height of a figure, roughly, is
a good size to work with.

6 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

Step Five
Now we trim four of the five ovals down, so that when we stack them up we get
a sloping hill. We decide with our plinth to make the final level half the width for
some variation. Our example is quite steep. You can make it more shallow-sided
if you prefer.

With hot glue we glued the cardboard layers together, starting at the bottom and
working up to the top. You could use PVA glue if you don’t have any hot glue but it
will need time to dry. Hot glue is quicker. Just be very careful as it is hot!

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 7

Step Six
This is optional, but we like to run some hot glue around each layer to fill some of
the holes and give the layers a bit of a softer edge. You can even use the hot glue
to model more detail on your plinth. Be mindful that the purpose of this plinth is to
provide a solid, flat footing for your model. Don’t make it too bumpy - leave some
areas clear and flat for your model to stand on.

Step Seven
We paint the whole thing in PVA glue as a sort of priming layer. This gives the next
layer better adhesion. Let it dry thoroughly. If you’re lucky enough to have heating
where you’re working you can carefully put it on a radiator to speed up drying.
Beware though - your cardboard might warp if it gets too hot on one side while
it’s wet on the other!

8 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

Step Eight
Paint the whole thing with PVA glue once more. Take your kitchen roll or tissues
and stick them onto the glued up plinth. This doesn’t have to be a neat job, and
wrinkles in the tissue are to be desired for extra random detail. Paint on more
glue and add another layer. This helps disguise the layers of cardboard a bit
more. Make sure you fill any gaps with scraps of tissue. You can add as many
layers as you want, but we find two works well enough. Let the whole thing dry
thoroughly.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 9

Step Nine
Next we paint the whole thing. A couple of thin coats of paint are worth doing - it’s
very very easy to miss spots, and find that the camera picks them up later, so take
your time with this base coat. Get the whole thing really well painted. We’re using
brown, but you can use any dark earthy colour. Dark green works too.

10 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

Step Ten
Grab your air drying clay boulders. Now for some fun. Grab a hammer and whack
em! (Be careful and wear eye protection!) You’ll need a hard surface for this,
so be sure to protect it with something like a tea towel or a piece of cardboard.
Breaking your solid boulders will give you some lovely natural-looking stones for
your plinth. If you really love the boulders you’ve made then you don’t have to
break them up like this, but we find it both satisfying and effective! Aim for a
selection of sizes for the most naturalistic feel.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 11

Step Eleven
Fire up the glue gun again and glue your stones to the plinth. We like to arrange
them in clumps, leaving clear slight lines through the plinth in several directions to
make sure we have a really versatile piece of plinthage.

12 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

Step Twelve
Paint your stones with the same base colour as your plinth. We find this is a good
thing to do in order to tie your plinth’s colours together, and it means you can very
easily touch up any mistakes. Air drying clay will suck up a lot of paint, so you may
want to thin your paint with some water. That can also give you some nice looking
effects, as you can see on that right hand rock.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 13

Step Thirteen
Dry-brush your rocks so that they get a nice rough look. Going over them a couple of
times with a dry brush works best. We’ve also added some dry-brushing to the sides
of our plinth to suggest cliff-like sides. We’re not necessarily committed to those
areas being bare rock, but it gives us some options for later. Let everything dry.

And rest!

That’s it for part one!

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If you hate fun, lack funds right now (we all know that feeling!), or just CANNOT
WAIT FOR THINGS, you can complete the project with some paint effects. Dry-
brushing on some patches of green, lighter brown and grey can work well. If
you’ve got some fancy basing paint you can use that to good effect too. Perhaps
you just want it to be a big boulder or cliff top. Experiment with it! The shot above
just uses the unfinished plinth we’re working on. You can see it still provides a
handy platform for your miniature in this basic state.

The figure shown here is The Seer from Bad Squiddo, painted by the author.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 15

Part Two: Finishing
We’re starting part two with our full dry plinth and the modelling is all done. It’s
now finishing time, and we’ll see this unlikely potato transformed into a useful and
naturalistic looking plinth! Keep the faith!

Tools for Part Two

For the final steps we’ll need:

• PVA glue
• An old brush
• Some basing supplies like flock and mini rocks.
• Tufts
• Paint for final finishing

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Step Fourteen
The fun really starts here. It’s really helpful to work on something like a sheet of
thick paper or scrap cardboard - we’ll be throwing around wads of tiny particles,
and being able to collect any overspill on an underlying sheet of something will
be useful. That will let us pour any extra material back into its container and
prevent waste.

We need to paint our plinth in PVA glue once again. For ease of handling we paint
half of the plinth at a time. You can opt to cover more or less of your plinth at a
time. Painting all of it in glue presents a couple of problems - holding it, and the
glue drying faster than you can finish painting the whole thing. Depending on your
finish of choice, you may want to paint the glue more thickly or thinly. For example,
if you’re just using flock (fake grass) which doesn’t need loads of thick glue, and
too much will drown it. If you’re using micro rocks and pebbles, you might want to
go a bit thicker to ensure adhesion.

Make sure you get glue right up to the rocks, and wherever you want grass to be.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 17

Step Fifteen
We’re using Krautcover Scenics for covering our plinth. These come premixed in
handy tubs, which saves a lot of effort for a relatively low spend.

You can also make your own mixes of grass flock and mini rocks and leaves, which
can be very satisfying and gives you a precise level of control over the colour of
your basing material.

Either way we want to get our basing “stuff” ready. In this case we stir the tub
because it has settled out over time.

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Step Sixteen
We carefully pour on our flock mix onto the glued area adding some by hand,
pinch by pinch to make sure all the glue is covered. We want to make sure the
flock goes right around all the rocks and into any nooks and crannies.

It’s ok if there’s a lot of overspill because we can scoop it up with the cardboard
we’re working on and pour it back into the container.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 19

Step Seventeen (Optional)
We’re trying out some new basing materials, so at this point we grab some
different stuff, and apply that in patches. We have a mix of some earth, grit, mini
rocks and micro sticks, which will break up the uniformity of the other mix, which
we find makes a more realistic finish. Oddly enough, adding this kind of extra
detail and variation helps the plinth disappear into your image because it looks
more naturalistic. If it’s all monotone green grass it will appear more obviously as
“scenery” in your photos. But work with what you’ve got! If you’ve only got one kind
of grass flock available, once it’s dry you can stain it with some watered down
paint or ink to provide some variety and naturalism.

With this second flavour of flock applied, we’re done flocking. If you’re smart you’ll
let everything dry for 30 mins or so. You can also see in this shot how hard it can
be on your brush, so don’t use anything precious for this task.

20 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

Step Eighteen
Grab your tufts if you gottem! We’re massive fans of tufts in a variety of colours.
There’s no need to splurge on these - we’ve built up a collection over years, so
that we now have a big selection to choose from. A variety of plant styles will
again add naturalism and realism and makes for a better plinth. We choose
a small selection of plants and stick to those. Adding too many will make an
overly busy feel. Repeating “notes” across the plinth will give a pleasing and
harmonious end result.

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 21

Step Nineteen
Apply your tufts carefully, thinking about how plants grow in the wild. They tend to
appear in clumps, and placing them in close proximity to our larger rocks seems
to make sense. What we don’t want is evenly spaced, geometric looking tufts. It
can be quite hard work to be disciplined enough to put them in a truly random
looking pattern, with clumps of different plants occurring together.

Most tufts have sticky stuff underneath which is strong enough to hold them in
place. You might find if the sticky fails that a drop of superglue works well. If we’re
using superglue we press them down with the end of a brush handle to avoid
gluing everything to our fingers.

22 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book

And with that we’re almost done. This is where we pause to look at what we’ve
made. And it’s looking good. With the amount of work we’ve accomplished on the
plinth, those rocks aren’t looking quite as good as they might, so now is the time
to finish them off.

Step Twenty
We grab some paint and carefully apply a couple more passes of light dry-
brushing on the rocks to pick out the texture and the edges to emphasise their
shapes. And that done, the plinth is complete! Looking good!

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 23

Our guide to using your Backdrops Book has lots of advice on how best to set
up your book, but here’s our freshly made plinth in action. We’re using a lovely
Slinger miniature from Bad Squiddo, sculpted by Alan Marsh and painted by Here
Be Goblins. What a lovely job!

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Don’t forget as you set up your plinth that you can turn it widthways or lengthways.
Using it lengthways can give you a lot more depth in your foreground, and rotating
your plinth will vary up how your shots look, and people won’t immediately
recognise the same old piece of scenery. Worth doing!

Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book 25

Credits
Written and photographed by Jon Hodgson
Layout by Paul Bourne
Backdrop Books available at www.handiwork.games and Bad Squiddo Games
Scenic Materials from Bad Squiddo Games
Miniatures shown:
The Seer from Bad Squiddo Games, sculpted by Shane Hoyle painted by Jon
Hodgson
Slinger from Bad Squiddo Games, sculpted by Alan Marsh and painted by Here
Be Goblins

Text and images ©2023 Handiwork Games Limited

26 Making a plinth for use with your Backdrops Book