Saturday, April 28, 2018

The Long Road Home


With the Little Wars Bolt Action tournament complete, it is time to get down to the army display board, and how I generated that in very rapid fashion, just like the objective markers!

As always, I began with the thinner pink underlayment foam, along with a few bigger chunks of insulation foam left over from the Barbarossa board.  This is why I save every scrap!!

I used wood glue and Elmer's extra strong glue on those pieces, and used painter's tape to hold them in place.


I started to use a glue/plaster mix during the Ardenne and Winter board projects, and that has worked well.  In this case, I will also be combining it with wood filler.


Since there is already glue in the mix, setting down some fallen trees with a few additional dabs of glue would have plenty of hold.


Using the dried tea leaves, I created ground fall texture around these fallen trees. The last time you saw me using that was on the winter board pieces here:



Time for the wood filler.  This was what I used on the roads:



Just as I did on the road lengths, I made the track and tire marks through the wet filler with the 1 inch flat brush.


Once the road was in place (I was hoping that it would hold all the vehicles in the list PLUS the Citroen objective marker!), I started to work on the opposite side of the road.  

There was more of an incline as well as more layers of foam to deal with on this side, so some of the wood filler was use to give it more "body" and strength.


Huzzah!  All of the landscaping is complete, and I also added a few trees.  I have a number of articles on how I use regular tree branches to make all sorts of trees.


I remembered that I had a set of 1/48 scale road signs, poles and cart wheels, and I thought those would be a nice touch to add in a hurry!


I grabbed whatever was at hand to make footprints in the mud, since it was possible that some of the troops might have to be walking along the same one as the vehicles.  It would also provide more of a human element to the board.


With a few light layers of sand over the board and on the center of the road, it was time to let this dry and set.


When I turned off most of the lights, I was greeted with this panorama!  I thought I would take an image which really displayed all the textures involved.


Once that was set, I took the Badger Stynlrez primers and quickly airbrushed some color onto the board.  You can see that I made the mud a bit lighter.  This is to offset the vehicles, which will cast a lot of shadows, and to allow the darker water stains in the ruts to show more too.

Knowing that the next few layers of color would be my greenish flock, I wanted to build up enough browns to make the green flock seem as if it really was growing out of dirt!

Stay tuned for the next episode, where you will see the flocking process and the water added to the ruts!  If you can support these kinds of tutorials on my Patreon Page, that would be very helpful!