Put in another long day yesterday to finish the final board!
After that was done I scraped the sides down to make sure they would still fit next to each other, had to be careful here because the sand is basically sitting on a layer of glue and it's worryingly easy to peel it back. Fortunately pushing from most directions does nothing.
I still have to give it all a matt coat of varnish to protect the paint, but a strong wipe with a hand cuts your hand rather than taking sand off, so I'm pretty confident that it won't chip much.
Anyway, the last board had lava on it, so I followed pretty much the same steps as for the other board.
First it was the grey foundation paint in the middle, overlaid with white, the cracks near the lava were foundation yellow. Next it was a nice heavy dose of yellow.
This was going to take a while to dry, so in the meantime I did the fortress grey drybrushing of the rest of the board and blacked in the cracks up the top.
I skipped a photo here sorry, this one shows the red layer on the far pit, while the closer one has had the red layer and the scorched brown layer on top.
And after a touching up of black around the edges, then putting the codex grey/fortress grey back around the edges:
As with the other board, the bubbles were painted in yellow then the bottom of the pits was given a gloss coat.
And before I show you the final product, here's an edge shot showing the old table. You'll notice it's nowhere near 4 foot wide and how uneven the surface is.
Drumroll please...
Ta-Da!
So much better than the old table!
And with some scenery added...
And a top view to compare with the original one I posted last week...
And, of course, I had to put some miniatures on for scale as well.
Close side of the board is Druzhag the Beastmaster with the Wild Warg Chieftain, six wargs, four giant spiders, two bat swarms, a cave troll, eight goblins with sword and shield, eight with spear and six with bow. That's a 500 point army with 35 models.
Far side of the board is Durburz the Goblin King with his retinue of four Goblin captains, the Drums in the Deep, ten goblins with sword and shield, fifteen with spear and eleven with bow. A 500 point army with 43 models.
Above is the troll and gobs on Druzhag's side. In the left background you can see some of the wargs, spiders, Druzhag and his bats.
Above is the Wild Warg Chieftain, Druzhag behind him, the skull on top of his staff kinda stands out - these pictures are all with flash, so as always, the colours etc. are a little off.
Above is Durburz's side, plenty of small green bodies to throw at the troll =) The drummers keep a nice back-beat to the battle. Oh, and in the front right you can see "The Ring" we use that to give to whoever has priority for the turn. It was originally just a plastic thing, I based it on a bit of sponge with some lava to make it a bit more of a trophy.
And another top view, if you look closely you can see the miniatures on there. They're really only on the middle two boards, heaps of space to move around still!
Oh, and one last picture to show that the scale still works with other minis:
My Mad-Cat next to the lava pits and some "rock spire" made of painted tree bark.
Anyway, that's all folks.
I'll force my brother to come over and battle me soon and put together a pictorial battle report.
Overall I'm really happy with the board, if you look at some bits closely (I'm not going to tell you where) there are details I'm not 100% happy with, but I have a feeling it would take a VERY long time to get it all perfect.
The lava came up way better than I thought it would and I like it SOOOO much more than the skull pits!
A short list of the things I found out while doing it:
Water down your glue! The bottom layer is good full strength, but if you're going to layer glue on top as well (which I recommend for sand to stop it coming off so easily) make sure it's watered down. The patches that I did with full strength glue still stand out a bit. Some of that might be me being overly sensitive, but in any case.
For large areas I highly recommend using a sponge instead of a brush to apply paint. No streaks! You can still get good coverage by spongeing more than once.
Don't stress when something looks horrible with only a single coat of paint. Actually, don't even stress when you've done, for example, an undercoat, a white layer, a yellow layer and a red layer. The lava didn't look very good until the final touching up. The sand didn't look particularly good until it had the drybrushed layers too.
Use light coats of paint, that way if you do stuff it up you can just re-undercoat and start again! If you use big blobs of paint you'll lose texture.
Don't listen to people who think you're wasting time and/or money. If you're enjoying what you're doing then go for it and have fun - that's what hobbies are for!
Use the internet to share what you're doing! Ask for advice on forums or just plain show off =) The more people that share what they're doing, the bigger the resource for the rest of us who are starting off.
Anyway, blathering now, off to re-arrange miniatures and celebrate the completion of the project.
Oh, and for you 40k people, I only have two painted marines (and the bases aren't even done) but...
P.S. Yes, I know I still have the fortress to paint - but not right now, thank you very much!
Well, finally time to bite the bullet and try for some lava effects. Two of the boards had big skull pits on them, so they're going to be my lava pits.
Firstly I had to put a base-coat over the black because the yellow paint would take a bazillion layers to show over it. Fortunately I just happened to have some Iyanden Darksun foundation paint, so I slathered that on fairly thickly.
After that it was another full coat of Golden Yellow, then a fairly heavy brushing of red, this crater is relatively small, so I wanted it to be "cool" compared to the larger crater, and that meant more red than yellow.
You can also see that I've begun preparing the larger ex-skull pit with Astronomican Grey foundation with a Skull White drybrush. Two reasons for that, one: I wanted to try a different technique to see which I liked best, two: I wanted this pit to be hotter, more yellowy, so wanted a lighter undercoat.
Next step is some Scorched Brown for the cooler rocks and stuff.
After that there are some touches of Chaos Black and neatening the edges, which were thoroughly messed up by the drybrushing. Also, the bubble in the middle was repainted Golden Yellow.
The whole surface of the lava, not the cracks or rocks, was then given a gloss coat to make it look shiny and stuff. I'm not sure what will happen when I later give the whole thing a matt varnish spray, but I guess I can re-apply.
This was a shot taken without the flash, so it's a little darker than actuality. Here's a shot taken WITH the flash, which makes it all much brighter than it really is. One day I'm going to buy a proper camera.
You can see that there is more of the yellow in the larger crater, and that the edges are a bit blacker rather than the more aged grey of the smaller, cooler crater. The reality of the board is obviously somewhere between those two images.
Technique wise, I ended up using the sponge again for the larger crater, I just can't seem to do a good job with a brush on a large area.
Here's a happy looking Warg for size comparison (flash on).
Well, now it's onto the final board, two more lava pits to go!
I also want to give credit for the technique. If my lava doesn't look good, it's not their fault, it's my poor application!
Lonewolf: http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.php?autocom=ineo&showarticle=302
Durinsbane: http://www.one-ring.co.uk/phpBB2/kb.php?mode=article&k=86
Also The Last Alliance on their old website, this link is to the current one: http://www.terrainguild.com/thelastalliance/index.php
If you're a player or fan of the Lord of the Rings SBG or War of the Rings I strongly recommend to you The Last Alliance group. Very, VERY helpful people and a great source of both information and entertainment.
Well, next post should be the last board with lava! After that it'll be me umming and aaahing over whether I'm done enough to give them the final matt varnish spray or not. Part of me wants to keep working at it, the other part wants to get on with playing games on it!
Had a busy day yesterday, so didn't get a lot done, also took waaaay longer than I thought it would to do the next section.
I wanted to make the large paving stones a blueish colour just to get some contrast on the boards. It took four attempts before I found a method that I thought looked okay. I'm still not perfectly happy with it, but it's the first time I've tried to paint something on that sort of scale and I found it hard to not leave brush marks.
I ended up using Shadow Grey painted on the stone, followed by a Badab Black wash, followed by a heavy spongeing of Shadow Grey again, followed by a light spongeing of a 50-50 mix of Shadow Grey and Space Wolves Grey.
I've also drybrushed everything else with Fortress Grey using an inch long brush. The cracks between pavers and extending out into the landscape were blackened for contrast. I tried to do Fortress Grey highlighting on the edges, but it looked too harsh, so I'm leaving it Codex, I think there's still enough contrast as it is.
Just for fun I also put some dwarf runes on one of the pavers.
This was my first attempt at freehand lettering. I used the technique they suggested in a recent White Dwarf magazine. On a bit of paper I sketched it out, then I worked from the middle towards the edges by putting dots at the corners. After that I just joined the dots. Then I used a tiny amount of Space Wolves Grey to highlight the edges of the letters.
Oh, and what does it say? "Drums in the deep" Hence the drummer goblins there. You can see that the miniature bases fit right in with the board. Yay! =)
Just one more board to do with a paver section on it and then I have to make the dreaded leap to the lava. *gulp*
Anyway, the flash kinda makes the contrast a bit more than it is in real life, but you get the idea.
All in all, it's not perfect, but not too shabby I think for my skills anyway. Getting to the point where I want to play a game on it already!
Anyway, back to the paints.
Well, in the last couple days I've done the following:
Firstly, I tested four different versions of coloring the base and settled on sand as the best way to get some depth and match the bases on my miniatures. This meant lots of glue and sand.
The basic procedure was to slather glue in randomish patterns on about a quarter of a board, deluge it with sand, wait a few minutes, pour off the sand onto some newspaper, pour the sand from the newspaper back into the old salsa jar I was using to store it, then repeat.
I say randomish patterns because where there were cracks on the ground I tried to extend them into the sand a ways to get some jaggedy patterns and hopefully break things up a little.
I waited for a day to make sure the glue had set, then gave it a loose brushing to get rid of some of the denser clumps. Then I mixed up about a 2:1 ratio of PVA glue and water in an ice-cream bucket and began the laborious process of going over all the sand again with a layer of glue. It took about 250-300 mL of glue all up, with it coming down to quite literally about a teaspoon of glue left at the end. Phew! Otherwise it would've been a trip to the shops.
Unfortunately, the sand I used in the first part of the process (last time) I hadn't watered down the glue and as a result those bits are shinier and less bumpy because of the smoothed glue on them. You can see then quite clearly when the flash is on. They'll always be not quite as good as the rest, but hopefully once it's all grey it might not be quite so obvious.
I had to leave that for a night as well, just to make sure the glue all set well. The goal is that with the two lots of glue, the three layers of paint and a final matt sealant finish it'll hold together and not drop sand anywhere!
Today was a good full day, fortunately plenty of paint drying time makes for plenty of rest breaks.
This morning I sprayed them all black using some black spray paint I got from Bunnings, far cheaper than the Games Workshop brand, but not as good quality. For this job, who cares! It just has to undercoat well!
I left them from about 9:30 in the morning until about 2pm to dry off outside. Then I mixed up a tub with some cheap black, grey and white paint (also from Bunnings) so that I had a nice big tub of greyish paint. As it dried it went a little blue-black-grey but it'll be highlighted anyway and the whole tub of paint cost next to nothing.
To apply it I used a sponge and blotted my way over everything. It took a while, but I think it was faster than using a brush and had the advantage of being imperfect for a hopefully more natural look.
So there you can see one coat of the dark grey. You might be able to see the cracks leading through the sand a bit more clearly. The big black areas will be one of two things. In places it looks like the surface has cracked to reveal an ancient pathway or something. I'll be painting those big flagstones a blue-grey colour, hopefully contrasting enough with the more white-grey colour of the sand.
The other black areas are the pits that I will attempt to colour as though they were lava filled. With the bluish flagstones and the yellow lava it should add just a few touches of colour to break up the monotony.
Here's a close-up at this stage.
Next phase was a highlight drybrushing of Codex Grey. Even with the huge area to do I wanted to use the Games Workshop color to match what my minis used. With some Jo Sonja acrylic thinner and a full pot and a half of Codex grey the board was drybrushed and sponged.
The technique was pretty simple. I used a sponge again and lightly brushed it back and forth over the sand to highlight it, then sponged it up and down on the bits with no sand, like the edges, gaps and cliff bits.
This shot compares two tiles, the top one has the Codex drybrush the bottom just the first grey sponging. Hopefully you can see the difference even with the dodgy photography!
And here's the whole board with the Codex coat.
And to put the fortress to scale (which I undercoated grey).
Anyway, next it'll be a final highlight of Fortress Grey. Still not 100% sure how I'll apply it, don't want too much because it's about the right colour at the moment, really just want little bits of it for the extra "lift" you get from it. And especially along the rocks and boulders near the cliffs. Hopefully I'll get onto that tomorrow, it's all up drying at the moment.
All up it took a little under 2kg of fine sand (about $1 a kilo at the pet store aquarium), a little under 2 cans of spray paint ($7 at bunnings), and about $15-20 worth of paints. Oh, and the $5 bag of sponges, of which I still have several left over for... um... sponging stuff later.
Well, it feels like I didn't get a lot done yesterday, but it's really slow going when you're waiting for glue to dry!
My brother took me out to get my birthday present and we played a quick skirmish game on the new board when we got back. He won, but only just!
After he left I got to work using green stuff (epoxy resin that you mix and sculpt before it sets hard). I wanted to fill in the remaining skulls by blobbing over the top of them to turn them into rocks. After they're painted the hope is you'll not be able to tell that they were ever there.
I'm still not sure what I want to do in terms of painting the board. My old 2x2.5 foot board was covered with sand and it came out well. I'm not sure I want that much sand though! I've started with just putting some on the hills, both for grip and to direct lava flow.
Again, I'm hoping that a paint job will not make it quite so obvious, but we'll wait and see. If it doesn't end up working with some sand and some not I can either take the sand off or (more likely) sand the whole board.
One coat of glue to put the sand on and another coat of glue over the top of it this morning to make sure it doesn't come off too easily. While waiting for glue to dry I put together the fortress bits Paul got me.
The CNC miniature mdf kits are really cool. You just have to cut the pieces free and then socket them together. The joins are so clever that the kits tend to hold together without even needing glue. I always glue them anyway, just to make sure things are well held for painting and transport etc.
From Milsims they are pretty cheap too, $16 for a section of wall. I got a corner section, an entrance and a straight section. There are also shaped pieces to fill in the openings if you want it to be all closed off rather than open. The corner section has stairs on it leading up to the top level. Just these three pieces are about 17 inches to a side, so it's quite a big structure. Perfect for defending against hordes of goblins or as ancient ruins with a powerful artifact held within.
It's the same materials and company that the village house was made from. I've only done a simple paintjob on it, but even so I think they come up looking good with pretty minimal effort and next to no cost compared to some of the alternatives.
The next few days will be glue and spray paint, so probably nothing to report - Sim.
After almost three years of illness, one of the ways I stave off boredom is by painting miniatures to play Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game and the like with my brother. We've been playing on a wonky kitchen table and on a scuffed felt pool table surface for the last few years.
For my birthday this year my lovely wife went out on a limb and bought me a Games Workshop Realm of Battle Board. It's six boards, each 2 foot square. They have various details on them, some have hill segments, some are flat. Because you can rearrange them in so many different configurations you have a huge variety of possible scenarios and terrains.
When you get it, the first thing that hits you is just how large it really is.
Here's a shot with our current skirmish forces put out...
I also put on all of my scenery. As you can see, there is a *LOT* of open space there! Oh, and a Mad Cat for Battletech games. Possibly overpowered vs. goblins.
On the right of the board you can see a painted and textured hill on top of the battle board hill. We had previously thought of that hill as being huge. It sits easily on top of the board hill!
Anyway. Here's a shot with every miniature I own on the board.
Still a lot of space! For those of you who are interested, the painted hill is a Citadel Modular Gaming Hill. The small house is a Village Dwelling from CNC miniatures (comes in mdf flatpack that you glue together then paint). There is a statue and some pillars from the Mines of Moria gaming pack. The jagged rocky outcrops at the front are just tree bark I based and painted. Some of the dark structures at the back are cork boards painted up, and there are some styrofoam walls up the back there too. The mushroom fields are thumbtacks and a bit of plaster painted in smurfy colours and the fence is just some leftover mdf from the building.
My plan is to paint the board in the same scheme as the bases of my minis, a subterrainian or grey mordor-like rocky wasteland. The only main modifications I'll be making are to remove the pits of skulls that the good people over at Games Workshop thought would make pleasant scenery.
Sure I could just cover them up with scenery whenever we play, but we sometimes want to play sci-fi stuff and skull pits and jedi just don't fit. They'd also have to have come from some pretty big giants to fit scale to battlemechs. Anyway, I don't have any power tools, so I nicked off to Mum and Dads to borrow his dremel. Dad picked it up in America when we lived there in the early 80s and it still works just fine. Of course, you need a transformer (which weighs a ton).
Here's a shot to show you the difference before and after the dremel got to work.
Today my brother is taking me out to Military Simulations (milsims) which is where we buy all our miniature stuff from. They are cheaper than Games Workshop as they almost always have sales on. Part of the amusing anecdote is that Tari was ringing them to ask about game boards on the sly but it just so happened that I was actually in the store at the time. Odds are that I heard the shop guy's side of the conversation about my birthday present without realising it!
Well, here's a skull-less shot. Have put a couple of layers of PVA glue to smooth the base of them now. Still not 100% sure on the next step. I have to decide whether to use the texture that's already there on the board, or to glue a layer of sand down first to make it rougher (but heavier).
There are also some scattered skulls still on the terrain, but I'll just use a little greenstuff to turn them into small rocks.
The skull-pits will become lava-filled in an attempt to add a little colour and contrast to the otherwise blandish wasteland. Although I guess it wouldn't really be Mordor or goblin infested underground if it was colourful!
-Sim.
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