A couple of weeks ago I started playing around with making some standing stone sorts of monuments as scatter terrain, having watched some videos like this one and this one and deciding that such terrain would be handy to have around. I didn’t actively plan for my symbols of ancient pagan worship to be finished on the day of the summer solstice, but it worked out that way.

Incidentally, this project almost caused my first significant crafting-related injury, because of this conversation:

My wife: “Watcha building?”

Me: “Menhir.”

Her: “What?”

Me: “Menhir.”

Her: “I’m not familiar with that term.”

Me: “Must be something only menhir.”

<Sounds of rummaging in the garage in search of a baseball bat>

I started with a handful of simple menhirs (menhiri?) hand-sliced into rough shapes out of XPS foam. I scratched a sun, a moon, and some Tengwar runes into one side of each stone with a pencil, and rolled crumbled aluminum foil across them to add texture. They were then white-glued onto some chipboard. I remembered to take an in-progress picture just as I began to slather on the standard black-and-(pseudo-)mod-podge.

Once coated, I set them aside for the time being and moved on to some more henge-y pieces. I cut out a handful of rectangles, wore the edges with sandpaper, foil-textured, and started gluing them to the bases, building some fallen or broken pieces and some vaguely pi-shaped structures.

But something didn’t look quite right.

Giving in to my nagging suspicion, I pulled up a picture of Stonehenge and discovered that the stones there don’t look like pi at all! I’d seen many pictures of it in the past but somehow it hadn’t stuck with me that most of the stones are placed narrow side to narrow side, often in groups of three with two stones laid across the top.

I decided to make five three-piece sections after this pattern, to be able to form a large circle with just those stones should a scenario call for it. I wanted to make them fairly symmetrical, so for the bases I used a circle cutter to create a disc, then used a protractor to mark each 72 degree angle (360 degrees divided by five slices).

After cutting them apart, taking out the innermost sections of the slices, and rounding all the corners, I built my henges on them. I followed the outer curve on each piece as a guideline for placing them.

They were mod-podgified before I remembered that if I’m going to add stones or gravel, I usually do it before the black coating… so this time I had to add them after.

Painting began with dark gray. I started dry-brushing on lighter shades, but wasn’t happy with the appearance I was getting from this process. I decided to try stippling on the lighter shades instead, which produced a simulated texture that I liked better than the dry-brush results. I did do a little dry-brushing of brown in a few spots to dirty them up a bit, but the grays were all stippled on. I still had some left of the brown-and-black wash with traces of metallic paint that I’d made for my cavern tiles, and I decided to apply some of that as well.

Grout-and-soil mix was applied to the bases with water and white glue. A spray of isopropyl alcohol mixed with water darkened up the soil, followed after drying by a spray of watered down white glue to make sure everything was locked in place.

Next I moved on to adding grass flock and some grass and flower tufts.