Hi all,
Over the past few months I received a couple of questions about how I made the back of my terarrium look lavastonish.
My terrarium
I made some promisses to post it on the forum, so finally I did. Before reading this I must say that the method used: PUR-foam, takes up a lot of space, so you shouldn't use this in an allready small cage.
http://www.pondpetsusa.com/miscellaneou ... _foam.html
This is the kind of foam I used, though it wasn't black & it wasn't bought at a pond-store but a DIY (do it yourself) store, which is probably cheaper and just as well.
This is what PUR-foam looks like from the inside.
The trick is to spray paint it when it's still wet to give it a lava-stone like texture. After it is all dried up I spray painted it to cover the PUR-foam and give it a more realistic color. The first step (spray painting it when it's still wet) should be tried with a small sample on a piece of cardboard a few times until you're satisfied with the result. Pur-foam expands a lot. So you only know the result when it's dry. I found that it doesn't need a full coverage of spray paint to give it a fine result.
Two examples:
The best I could get
Bad
You can see in the second example it almost has a smooth surface. I used too little spraypaint on it.
For the final spray painting I used two different colors, a dark and a light brown. I first used the darker color to cover every crook and every hole. After this dried up I slightly used the lighter spray paint to highlight. This creates a darker shade for the cracks and holes in the 'lavastone'.
It is important to cover all foam with paint, because feeder animals will feed on the foam if you don't. When this gets out of hand they might even get inside the foam.
What I really like about the PUR-foam is that one can also stick things in it like i did with this branch to make it more real:
wooden branch
When purfoam is dry it is very easy to carve holes in it and I used this characteristic to create a shelter. As you can see in the following picture I didn't use spray paint to cover the foam in this shelter, but tile glue:
The reason I did this was that I couldn't get inside of the shelter with the spray paint can, but could with the glue.
And now something completely different since I got some more photo's. I found that Sandram really liked flat shelters where he could just get in/underneath. Therefore I used flagstone supported by four stones to give him a alternative shelter to the one I created with the PUR-foam.
In 6 months I'm creating a new terrarium to give Sandram more space, so if you've got neat ideas to decorate your terrarium, this is the place to share
.
