Building a 120 x 180 cm gaming board – part 2
In the last article I covered the start of a single piece 180 x 120 cm gaming board. This time, I'll be continuing the build by adding texture, painting and flocking the entire board. As mentioned in the last issue this board was built for my club's event in July of 2018 called Legen Invitational.
Since all the planning for the build was done last time, we won't repeat it here. So far we've built the wooden frame and cut the high density styrofoam boards to size. Once we were satisfied with the result, we glued the styrofoam into the frame using PVA glue and left it to cure properly.
Our club member, Goran Krunić, stepped in to help Ana with the work in my stead. For the work covered in this article, they used:
- glues - PVA 1kg
- paints and spreys
- 6 Pebeo Deco Paints (black, white, grey, dark brown, ochre and ash), one black matt acrylic sprey and one clear matt acrylic sprey
- large brushes No 90, No 40
- static grass - various
- sand and gravel (3 - 4 sizes)
- scalpel blade
- sanding paper
- masking tape
Sanding
Once the styrofoam boards were set, they needed to be sanded down in order to remove the diamond shaped pattern. When choosing the styrofoam, my advice is to try and find smoothe ones. However, smoothe ones weren't available when we did our shopping so we were stuck with the patterned ones. Removing these patterns can be a tedious job, especially on large surfaces as this. Therefore Ana made a makeshift tool for sanding by placing a piece of sanding paper around a cardboard box. After sanding, use a large brush to remove any and all particles. At this point, the guys just chucked it all to the floor and swiped the floors with a broom upon the end of the building session.
Adding texture
Next step was to add the texture. Since we all agreed that the entire board would be more or less uniform, we didn't do any features (like roads, rivers, lakes etc.). This made things easier to texture. Ana divided the entire board into several sectors to make the job easier. First she covered one sector with a slightly watered down PVA (just enough so it would spread easily). Then she sprinkled some larger bits of gravel, adding more texture progressively going from larger granulate to smaller. The final granulate size was smallest chinchilla sand. She repeated the process in all the other sectors. Once the texturing was done, the entire building area was cleaned with a broom.
Painting
Leaving to dry overnight, Ana continued the process in the morning with an application of a black undercoat. She used a black matt acrylic sprey. After it was dry, she proceeded to paint the board. The board was first painted with dark brown. The process of drybrushing was continued with several layers of brown and ochre with a final finish of ash. As the board was basicly a uniform surface she painted everything using a size 90 brush. When the paints were dry, Ana spreyed everything with a clear matt acrylic sprey.
Vegetation
After the painting, as always, Ana and Goran added the vegetation. It was basicly a mixture of several kinds of static grass – a brownish 3mm long one, a yellowish-brown 5mm long one and some yellowish 7mm tufts. To create better variety, Ana mixed several mixes of different colours and applied them all with watered down PVA glue. In order to add even more diversity, Goran helped her make a home made static grass applicator which was described in one of our former articles! As you can see the grass applied with the static grass applicator, really stands up no matter how short the fibres are.
This marks the end of the Legen board build.
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