Road Construction Season

I recently picked up some 15mm buildings from Crecent Root. I was originally looking for some laser cut MDF buildings but I couldn't find anyone on this side of the pond that was making anything nice and reasonably priced. Or really much of anything that was in the right scale and time period.

The buildings I got are obviously intended for WWII but I think they'll work well enough for me. I'll do a post about painting them up soon as I get them done but first I wanted to make a board for them. My plan is to put them together into a little village with cobblestone streets. (Well technically they're paved sett streets, as cobblestones are round stones and nobody really used them for paving anymore, instead using rectangular granite setts sometimes called belgium block.)

Laying out the roads. I wanted them off center so the buildings would cross over tiles and help hide the join lines.

I decided to reuse the vinyl tile idea for the base but I wanted to add the cobblestone street. Since I didn't feel like sculpting thousands of individual stones I decided to try stamping out the road. I sculpted a couple of small patches of cobbles out of Procreate. Then I used a plastic instamold to make the stamp from them.


The instant mold sets hard so should work as a stamp. This stuff is from CoolMini but I'm sure there are others available.

I then pressed a layer of air hardening clay down for the road. I sort of humped it in the middle and blended it down toward the edges. Then I stamped away. I had to blend the different areas together and resculpt some of the stones to fill in areas. Then I put it away to dry overnight.

Next day I got a nice surprise as the clay had shrunk and cracked as it dried. So I reglued the pieces down to the tile and filled in the cracks with some new clay and pressed in the pattern again. I also layed down some wood filler in other areas to blend the roads in and add some texture. I'll use more on the roads themselves to hide the worse defects in the cobblestones.

                    I bought the clay specifically because it stated little shrinking or cracking. I'd hate to see lots of cracking.                      The clear blobs in the upper left are my stamps.

Hopefully painting will help hide the grid of tool marks from the stamping process.

Next up: Painting and flocking