Modular Gaming Table: Part 9

Hurray! I just finished my first panel... I wanted to finish one before the holidays, otherwise I probably wouldn't be able to enjoy myself. Then again, the cheer pressure of keeping my followers happy might have had something to do with it. Well enough already, here it is...

Let me take you through the steps. I started with painted the borders black and varnished the surface with a clear acrylic varnish, no I didn't bother doing the bottom.

I bought a low quality grass from a dutch company called Berka Scenery which sells Static Grass (100 gram) for 6,75 euro. That's the same company that ripped me off with the stones I bought. The actual costs of making this stuff is probably way lower, at least it's about 6 times as cheap as the GW Static Grass.

The color isn't great, but that's actually not important if you dry-brush it. This article explains and shows some of the effects when you dry-brush static grass. The original color of Berka's grass is much greener than GW's grass. When dry-brushing you can do a lot with it.

I used three different colors of green grass and mixed these together to form one big bucket of grass. I'm not sure, but I believe the colors are called summer, spring and autumn.

My precious spice

The tools for the job

Application is pretty straightforward. The difficult part is getting a neat transition between the grass and the bare surface parts. I watered down some wood glue (1:2) and applied it with the medium brush. While working quickly I made sure the inner borders of the bare surface parts contained a thinned down layer of glue. Almost as if you dry-brush the inner borders with glue.

Not depicted on the picture, I used a strainer to apply the static grass mixture. After removing the excess grass, I thinned down the inner borders of the bare surface parts with the small brush. I did this while the glue was still wet.

The results after applying the grass mixture

I dry-brushed the static grass with the same paints and in the same sequence I used for the panel surface. I dry-brushed it until I got the desired results, not really using a clear method. It's a creative process.

TIP: Make sure all excess paint is removed from the brush, failing to do so could render the grass unrepairable.

A dwarf try out

It's hard to see on the picture, but the underlying surface does have its effect on the grass. Maybe I will add some tuft later on, after all panels are finished. Far now I'll keep it as it is.

In my next post I'll cover the water effects.

Modular Gaming Table: Part 8

Completing the sixth panel, overwhelmed me with joy, I immediately set out and did a test with a 3x2 configuration.

Config 3x2 x11:y0

Config 3x2 y21:y0

I tried to capture some of the coolness I've witnessed while assembling the hill panels. I have to say the pictures don't do it justice, it looks better in real life. However, you can see that they fit nicely and that the slight down curve of table help pushing the hill panels in place.

Ohh... Tight fit!

I'm painting the panels with a medium quality acrylic paint. I've bought 4 different colors for the ground surface, these are: Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre Extra and Titanium Buff Light. I started with painting all panels with Burnt Umber (shown above). I watered the paint down considerably (3:1) as to avoid blogging the surface with paint and to improve application. It takes two layers on a black surface to get good coverage. The pictures above show coverage of the first layer. In overall I needed two bottles (500ml) of Burnt Umber to paint 12 panels.

TIP: I added black paint to the foam-coat mixture to get a black base color. It would have been easier if I bought black latex paint in the first place.

At the time of writing I've finished the ground surface of all the panels and painted them all with two layers of Burnt Umber.

The panels are now ready to be dry-brushed. This is done with a LARGE brush. I'm dry-brushing the panels with the remaining 3 colors in the following order: Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre Extra and Titanium Buff Light. Below the results of the first two panels.

Don't worry, the panels are far from done, these are just the initial results after dry-brushing. I'll cover the details in upcomming posts, but first I'm taking a one month holiday.