Now that all your pieces are complete, its time for painting! Painting with spray paint is easiest, but spray paint usually dissolves foam. It's not actually the paint that dissolves the foam, its the propellant mixed with the paint. However, you may be able to take advantage of this! Spray paint a small piece of foam, and see what texture it leaves when it dries. Sometimes the melted, bubbly look of the dissolved foam can be an awesome texture.

Base Coating

If you want to protect your foam from spray paint, you can do a base coat with latex paint. This will allow the spray paint to sit on top of the latex, and not react with the foam. You can also use acrylic paints from the craft store (or dollar store). If you've been leaving all your foam pieces separate, it is fastest to base coat everything with a roller (Picture #1). This way it only takes a few min per tile. Once you've rolled everything you can, use a brush to touch up the last areas (Picture #3). Don't forget to paint the edges of the tiles too! I left painting the edges till the very end, that's why most of the pictures have blue edges (Picture #4). Painting the edges is easy if you do 2 at a time, and leave it to dry. This allows you to rotate the tiles without fear of getting wet paint on the floor. You can use newspaper to make a clear area for painting, I also used a big sheet of MDF from the gaming table to protect the floor.

Dry Brushing

Once everything is base coated, you can begin the detail work. Dry brushing is the fastest way to make the terrain pop, it really takes advantage of the textures that you've put down. Another option is to lightly dust colours on with spray paint. I wanted my terrain to look ashey, so I went with a black base coat, a grey dry brush, followed by a white dry brush.

To dry bush, get a small amount of paint on your brush. Wipe the brush on a paper towel, to press the paint into the bristles, as well as wiping most of the paint off. When there is a small amount of paint left on the brush, lightly paint over your textured areas. The small amount of paint on the brush will catch on the raised areas, leaving the lower levels untouched. This is a fast way to get highlighting done. Pro Tip: Dry brush in a circular motion, if you do a linear motion (up down side to side) it looks really obvious and leaves streak marks. Circular moves looks more natural.

Once your grey is complete, you're ready to dry brush the next layer (Picture #5)! Don't dry brush the entire textured parts, leave some parts grey so you have a variety of colours (or in this case, shades) showing. This makes it looks a bit more realistic. Picture #6 shows the slight difference between a grey dry brush and a white dry brush.

You should dry brush the edges of the rock texture as well. Use the same technique, and focus on the edges and corners so it looks like the rocks are lighter where light hits them. Use the white dry brush a bit heavier on the very corners to make it really pop.

Final Assembly

It's easiest to leave your mountains and craters separate to make painting easier. Now that painting is done, you can glue everything to your tiles using the same white craft glue. You should also use some pins to hold everything together. The pins can be toothpicks, or paperclips cut short and straightened. Once your pins are in, spread lots of white glue around the bottom of your mountains (get right to the edges!) and press them to the top of the tile. Put some weight on top to hold it together while it dries. You can also put some dots of hot glue in as well to hold it in place for the white glue to dry.

Now you're done!