Lower Fickleham In the Sun

Finally managed to squeeze in taking some pictures of the boards with the village and other terrain laid out on them. It ended up a lot sparser than I thought. I'm going to need more hedges and trees (can never have too many hedges or trees in the collection really) and also some more fields to fill it out.  

I just made a couple of additions to the boards since I last "finished" them. I wasn't real happy with the way the roads blended into the rest of the boards so I added some sand and paste as dirt in the gutters and along the edges. I also used some used and dried green tea leaves as leaves in spots of the gutters and added some patchy static grass on the edges.The cliff board also got some sandy texture and static grass around the rock faces.

Closer look at the improved roads.

I considered adding more grass but I think I want to keep the boards relatively simple and then make several flexible caulk pieces to go over them. These will be fields, rocky terrain, woods and such. I'm hoping it will give me more options overall. I'm still not real happy with the poor fit of the boards together and the unsightly join line. Hopefully the use of overlay pieces will disguise these as well. If I ever make more board sections I'll have to be more careful to get more exact edges but for now I at least have something to play a game on. 

Terrain Boards Finished

Finally the saga of the terrain boards comes to completion. I've been taking the opportunity to work bit by bit on them over the past couple of months. I started these quite sometime ago and then tried to get them complete in a four day rush last November. If you want to take a moment to look back you can follow this link to see the previous posts. Modular Boards

After the last coat of thinned down wood filler as a seal coat I also added some patches of other texture. This was done with a combination of scrubbing on some straight wood filler and using pumice gel I had lying around. ( I bought the pumice originally for basing miniatures but it didn't quite work the way I would have liked so it's getting used up here.)

Rock face after painting

I tried to put in a rough path winding up the hill as well.

Next up was painting. I actually pulled out some of my previous completed terrain pieces that would go with them to make sure things would match up.This is probably more important with the flocking later on though. The wood sides just got a straight coat of black gesso. As much as I would of liked to stain them I had to grind through several layers of the plywood to make the sides straighter and I expect the finish would have been awful.

Roads were kept dirtied up but with some cobbles showing for contrast. 

Last part was putting on the flocking. I used a first pass of mixed colors of flocking. I learned as I went along so the flocking on the first board with the crossroads is a bit rougher than the last. I decided to keep the flocking sparse in areas so that the painted parts show through underneath. If it turns out I don't like the effect once I start using them I figure I can always put another coat on.

All of the pictures were taken quickly with my cell phone. Unfortunately the boards don't fit in my lightbox so the pictures aren't the best. I'm hoping that I can take some better pictures soon with better natural light and with some of my terrain and figures on them.

Passing inspection

All four together. 

Thanksgiving Terrain Board Spectacular Day 4+5: Cyber Monday

I decided to combine yesterday and today into a single post for two reasons. One I really didn't get all that much done either day so this way there is a bit more progress. Secondly, I couldn't find any official term for the Sunday after Thanksgiving. ( Although I refer to it as Sad Sunday as I know the next day is back to the workaday grind.)

More road work

Close up of the individual sections after they dried. The clay tends to contract as it dries causing the gaps. 

So what did I get done? Mostly laying more roads onto the boards. I also finalized some carving on the rock faces. Finally, I put a coat of thinned wood filler mixed with glue onto the surfaces. This works to both seal and harden the foam and give it a bit of texture. Once I get the crossroads section up to the same place I'll be onto painting. Hopefully the next post will be with them finished and ready for gaming.

Seal coat is still wet.

Rock faces all done and coated. 

Thanksgiving Terrain Board Spectacular Day 3: Small Business Saturday

Luckily due to the rampant commercialization of the Thanksgiving weekend I have a ready made name for everyday. Today is Small Business Saturday and a great day to get out to your local game store of course any day is good day to go to a game store. Anyways back to the boards.

My toolkit for road making. 

I didn't quite get as far as I would of liked today but I did manage to put in one of the roads. I'm using the same basic method as I've used previously for my roads, basically laying down air hardening clay and using some home made stamps to press in the cobblestone pattern.

One set of roads done. The first half was done earlier in the day and is mostly dried. 

I'm not worrying too much about getting it perfect since as discussed in a long ago post, most of the road is going to be covered in dirt. It still ends up being a slow process, I think I might consider doing a resin mold to cast road sections for future projects. But for now I'm going to carry on with this.

It's pretty clear at this point that the boards aren't going to get done this weekend, or even particularly close. But I have managed to get some solid work done on them. Hopefully with whatever I can get done tomorrow it will mostly be downhill ( and visually more exciting) from there.

Thanksgiving Terrain Board Spectacular Day 2: Black Friday

There is always a stage with these projects where although you put in several hours of work it pretty much looks the same as you started. That was today for me.

Beginning of the day after everything was glued. 

With the wood glued on I needed to neaten everything up. The wood didn't line up exactly with what I had on the boards before. The hills needed to be re-cut some and the road ends as well. So today was mostly trimming and sanding. After that I applied some wood filler to fill any gaps and to help smooth out the slopes of the boards. I'm hoping that in the end this means everything will join up nicely although I do expect there to be some gaps still. That seems unavoidable with my rather slapdash method. 

End of the day. 

Now hopefully the unexciting structural part is done and I can move onto the more interesting bits. Tomorrow will probably consist of putting in the roads and doing the last carving and smoothing of the hills.

Thanksgiving Terrain Board Spectacular Part I

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! In addition to stuffing myself full of poultry today I've also decided to make the most of the long weekend and finish off a project that has been an albatross ( or perhaps a turkey) around my neck. Namely my modular terrain boards.

Over the past months I chipped away at these so some progress has been made since I last posted on them. All of the boards have been sanded to give a more irregular surface. I really dislike the billiard table smooth look on my boards so I try to add some features to it. This is pretty easy with large boards or ones that can stand alone. Its a bit trickier with modular ones like this particularly at this scale.

The boards at the start of the day.

Normally I'd work the insulation foam over with a heatgun to make some dents in it but I have no idea where my heatgun is at the moment and I wanted to try a different and much messier technique. I wrapped a tennis ball with sandpaper and attacked the boards. The art in it is trying to get it to look like the real undulations of open ground while at the same time making sure that things like buildings can still be placed on it without looking all wonky and that it will still join up with other boards. While I was at it I also carved out my rock faces on the hill sections.

I'll do some more fine carving work on the rock faces once I get some spackle on the boards.

This past week I've been inspired by looking at others work on modular board sections, particularly the fantastic river sections done by the Mad Guru at his Maiwand Day Blog. One thing that I wanted to use was the wooden rails on the sides. In the past I have always had problems with modular boards not really matching up at the joins. I thought this technique could give me a bit more precision to the edges.

Unfortunately, at this stage I don't think I can replicate the integral use of molding for the edges. Plus I'm on a budget with this project so I decided to use some flooring material I had sitting around since we remodelled part of our house. This is 3/8" plywood that got ripped down to proper width and then cut to size. I then gang cut the proper notches out for the roads and the hill sides. All of these are getting glued onto the outside of the boards with Gorilla Glue to frame them out.

Supervisor T inspects the makeshift workstation. 

All glued together and off to the drying rack. 

So that's where they stand right now. Tomorrow we'll see what progress I can make around the rest of the holiday activities.

Back to the Terrain Boards

Quick update on the terrain boards that I started some time ago. I'm doing the roughing in on the four sections. These are 1.5' square, an odd size I ended up using mostly for storage considerations.

I glued up the hill sections using Gorilla glue based on information from David Neat's excellent website. Highly recommend and thanks to Tony at Dampf's Modeling Page for including the link in a previous post. Also highly recommend if you aren't checking out his blog.

Gorilla Glue is a foaming polyurethane that reacts with water and bonds the pink foam really well. I've previously used both PVA and Liquid nails and this stuff while pricey beats them hands down.

Where the Pink Panther is peeking over is about where one rock face will go with a second above it. The rest will be smoothed down.

I also cut down the road sections and then had to smooth the resulting hacking back down. I just roughly packed in some DAS to level it. Seeing how well the Glue worked I'll probably cut sections out completely, cut them down and reglue them in the future.

I'm thinking I'm going to work on the road in sections in order to avoid paving induced insanity.

Next steps are sanding everything, pressing in the road pattern, and carving out some rock faces. I also need to look up some examples of cobblestone road intersection and how the stones ended up being laid.