Making Dust Clouds

Here's a simple How-To article on making Dust Clouds. Granted, its not much off the great tutorial in the back of Hellfire and Back!, but it might be helpful some how!

For BattleCry I decided that I needed a dust cloud for each vehicle in my force, which was 31. I hate odd numbers so I went with 32!

Step 1: The dog was so kind as to rip open his dog bed, so I had plenty of stuffing kicking around! Just needed to tear out some whispy-looking bits.

Step 2: I prepared 32 medium bases by covering the top in PVA glue and sprinkling sand over the top. Letting that dry overnight, I was ready to go.

Step 3: After the glue had cried, I used my trusty hot glue gun to put a massive blob of glue in the middle. Don't bother with trying to glue it down with PVA as it doesnt stick to the stuffing really well.

Step 4: Fix the whispy stuffing bit onto the base so that it simulates movement. Don't worry if you've got a squirrely looking one as you can trim it with scissors later.. 

Steps 5-36: Rinse & Repeat

Steps 37 & 38: once they were all done, I took each base and stuck them to a piece of cardboard with sticky tack. (Forgetting this vital step sent manya dust cloud into the wind! Then I undercoated them all with SP09 Italian Armour spray paint, available from Battlefront. Once that dried I did an extremely light dusting of SP07 British Armour (Desert).

These sprays sealed the dust clouds together and made them quite durable. I'd say I used about 3/4  of the Italian can and about 1/3 of the British one, so you can get a lot of dust clouds out them. 

That was it! And, best of all, they worked a treat!

Thanks for reading. Next up some information about the Sudan Defense Force and how to model them in Flames Of War.