Lead Adventure Forum
Other Stuff => Workbench => Topic started by: Elladan on May 14, 2012, 08:45:25 PM
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Hello,
Over the last years I've got many mails asking questions about how I did my fur mats, what materials I used and where to buy the synthetic fur. I am just working on a smaller terrain mat (1,20m x 1,20m) for a demo and gaming table to be used on the RPC (RolePlayingConvention) in Köln. It will be customized to show off some buildings and other terrain-pieces from Stronghold-Terrain (www.stronghold-terrain.de (http://www.stronghold-terrain.de/)). This is a small company I run with my friend Mirco. We are producing and selling high quality terrain pieces for 28mm - 32mm miniatures. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do a detailed tutorial with tots of WIP pictures.
The synthetic fur
I want to start with some infos about the synthetic fur I use. It is called Edelpelz Antilope/Bär. I regulary ordered it from Lifesell, a german online shop.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/065.ht1.jpg)
Here is a link to the fur in their shop: www.lifesell.de (http://www.lifesell.de/oxid.php/sid/x/shp/oxbaseshop/cl/details/cnid/657468cb2df447ee3.48375545/anid/65941e5afd7ece259.28264582)
The groundcolour is a warm midbrown. For my taste this colour is a perfect base to tint the fur. It can easyly be coloured with darker tones like greens and browns. These are the most common colours in moderate climate zones. When being tinted, either with an airbrush or a brush, the upper parts of the fibers get most of the paint. For this the lower parts of them tend to show (more) of the original colour of the fur. The midbrown looks like dried grass. The clothlike material didn't get much paint either (apart from being cut extremely short and getting hit with lots of paint) and the brown is also good to represent the colour of the earth. When using fur in a lighter colour like beige of white for example the remaining groundcolour of the fur didn't look right. On the other hand darker fur, like darkbrown or black for example, is much more difficult to tint. It is very hard to brighten a dark groundcolour with a lighter tone because much more paint is needed to do this and it is much more likely that the fur will tend to stick together and ruin the special effect of the fur terrain.
The length of the fur is 14mm. When used with heroc 28mm miniatures the vegetation will reach a man up to the hips. This is a good hight to represent cornfields, high grass or medium reed. But it works also very well with 15mm miniatures as you can see here on some older furmats: LINK (http://www.elladan.de/055%20Fur%20mats%20for%2015%20mm/055.htm)
The fur is very soft and miniatures and terrainpieces weight down the fur. It comes as yard good in a breadth of 140 cm.
The other materials, tools and paints I used will be described in the following chapters.
The Plan
This furmat was specially build as a demo and gaming table to show off some of the actually existing terrain pieces from Stronghold-Terrain. My friend and business partner Mirco also wanted our new copplestone roads to be included. We decided to do a crossroad as a place, where the beginning of a small hamlet around a tavern has been settled. So we put the prime components on a table an repositioned them until we were satisfied with the result. A quick snapshot worked as a scatch for the further building process. A printout of this can be seen on top of the untreated fur in the next picture.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_01.jpg)
The first step was to position the different road parts on the original fur. I used some spare casts of different coloured testcasts to determine the exact position of the road. These had been drawn on the fur with a black marker.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_02.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_03.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_04.jpg)
Here is a link to our shop if you are interested in the copplestone roads: LINK (http://www.stronghold-terrain.de/shop/index.php?cat=c9_Town-accessory.html&XTCsid=c8dbf7a309b87ab2d6902320a590a4fb)
The shaving
As mentioned above, the fur has a length of 14mm. This is the maximum height the fields or meadow can have but most of the fur has to be shortened. This can be done with a small scissor or with a haircuttingmachine for animals. After cutting my first big terrain mat by hand with a scissor, I brought the cuttingmachine for animals (dogs). This can save a lot of time but isn't cheap. I tried two models for human hair but they didn't worked with the ultra fine and dense fibers. Some effects look better when done with the scissors, so I always use them in a second step after I roughly cut the fur with the machine. The special scissors in the middle of the next picture is to thin out the fur (normaly human hair) and didn't worked to well.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_05.jpg)
This time I wanted the different pieces of our copplestone roads to fit perfectly on the mat so I started cutting the roads with the cuttingmachine. I cutted the fur as short as possible (2-3mm). The dirtroad has been roughly cutted in this step too. Now as I had devided the area of the furmat in four parts it was more easyer to plan the length of the fur for the smaller areas.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_06.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_07.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_08.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_09.jpg)
I left two smaller areas untouched to represent cornfields later. The other areas had been cut to different length to generate some varity and make the mat look interesting. I cut the cultivated areas to a shorter and more uniformly length than the natural ones. With the scissors I cut areas of patchy fure. I also left a small stripe of higher fur next to the roads. The final result after shaving can be seen in the next two pictures.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_11.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_12.jpg)
WARNING:
I want to give all of you who might try a furmat for yourself a warning. The process of cutting the syntethic fur is very very littering. I learned from my first tries to don't do the cutting in the home, not even in the hobby cellar. The synthetic fibers are lightweight and levitate all around by the least waft. I always do the shaving on sunny and windy days in the open. Most of the cutoffs can be collected and put in a bucket but the smaller fibres are blown away.The following picture shows the cutoff from this relatively small project.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_13.jpg)
Airbrushing the cornfields
The next step was to colour the cornfields. I often start with the colours that are lighter than the original groundcolour of the fur. As mentioned above it is much more difficult to do this without clogging the fine fibers of the fur. Any mishaps can be repaired by shortening the affected areas and/or colour them in a darker green.
This step is best done with an airbrush. It is very difficult to achieve the effect with a brush. I use the VEGA 2000 airbrush and a compressor. The paint is an acrylic colour from LUKAS. I diluted the paint with water in a 1:1 ratio. The colour tone I used was a light ochre.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_14.jpg)
I applied the paint in several very thin layers and let each one dry before I started the next. Even though the synthetic fibers sticked together a little. The change of colours is not very obvious but modified the colour tone from bownish to drab, as you can see in comparison to the small piece of untreated fur in the next two pictures.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_16.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_17.jpg)
Airbrushing the meadows
Tinting the fur with different kinds of greens was much easier because there is fewer paint needed to obtain a bright or dark green colour. I used different shades of green and also added some ochre or darkbrown at some times. Again I used diluted acrylic colours from LUKAS and applied them with my airbrush.
Excursion: If you don't have an airbrush:
This step can also be done with a big brush with synthetic bristles from the DIY shop. The green and brown colours are darker than the groundcolour of the fur and more intense than the ochre from the last step. For that reason fewer paint is needed for tinting. When using a brush it is most importend not to add much paint to it. The painting technique is similar to drybrushing. Only take a little paint to the brush. If necessary remove the excess by whiping the brush on a piece of paper or a paper towel. More infos and some pictures of these technique later.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_18.jpg)
The next pictures show some detail shots of the result after airbrushing the main areas. As you can see I took care to vary the shades of green. For my taste this looks more interesting and natural than doing them in nearly the same colour tone.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_20.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_21.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_22.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_23.jpg)
The following two pictures show an overview of the result after applying the basic colours with my airbrush. In this pictures the graduations in colours from a bright ochre over many geens to a dark brown-green are clear visible.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_24.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_25.jpg)
Burning the dirt road and the earth grounds
The next step was to prepare the areas that don't show vegetation. They had been cutted very short in the cutting process. I learned from my privious attempts a simple trick that pulled up the result a lot. I used a lighter to scorche the remaining vibers. They singed to tiny globules and resulted in an interesting surface that looks like sand or grit when painted later. I strongly recomment a lighter for fireplaces as seen in the next pictures. Otherwise a normal lighter gets hot as hell after a few minutes. I know it because I've learned it the hard way.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_26.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_32_cr.jpg)
To be continued ...
I hope I could give some of you some useful hints und you like the result so far. Comments and criticisms are welcome.
Ciao
Elmar
www.elladan.de (http://www.elladan.de/)
www.stronghold-terrain.de (http://www.stronghold-terrain.de/)
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That looks great. Inspired by your earlier attempts I went to the habadashery the other day to get some skinned teddy bear, but unfortunately they didn't have any, so will be watching yours with interest.
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That looks amazing. I'm gonna be honest I'd never consider using fur every, ordinarily i think it would look cheap and nasty... But this looks anything but! Bravo good sir, bravo.
Cheers
Andy
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Thanks for posting this! I've been interested with the teddy bear fur idea for a while, but was'nt sure how to work with it .This helps a lot!
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Thanks a lot for this great tutorial. I have seen you fur mats before and they are awesome.
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Brilliant, I've always wondered how these were done.
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Wow. Thanks for the tutorial. Your mat looks amazing.
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Still looking sooooooooooo great.
I remember seeing your site years ago and running out and buying teddy bear fur and all but being completely unable to achieve the look because I lacked the airbrush. lol
Still got the fur... and now I have an airbrush. Maybe I should get busy. 8)
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really useful, thank you very much!
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excellent thank for this.
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A real public service! :-*
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I had never seen this before, thanks for taking the time to make a tutorial, was very fun to read.
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This really needs to be a sticky! Brilliant stuff.
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Brilliant tutorial, thank you.
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This is really terrific!
I guess that after painting the mats can easily be rolled up and stored away without any problems?
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I have seen several tutorials on how to do this and this one is by far the best I have seen. Well done!
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Hello,
and thank you all very much for your kind comments. I am actually working on the second part of the tutorial but I think you have to wait a few days because my spare time is very limited for the next days.
The terrain mat is finished since 10 days and saw its first public appearance on the RolePlayingConvention (RPC) in Köln (Germany) on 05./06.05.2012.
Perhaps I can shorten the time of waiting for the second part of this tutorial with some pictures of the finished mat. We uploaded some pictures on the news page of Stronghold-Terrain (http://www.stronghold-terrain.de/neues_eng.html). Here is a link to the RPC 2012 PICTURES (http://www.stronghold-terrain.de/seiten_inhalt/Vollbilder/rpc2012.html) if you are interested.
And a picture with some well disguised visitors of the RPC posing with our demo table as a small teaser:
(http://www.stronghold-terrain.de/bilder/Vollbild/RPC2012/Weihenstein1.jpg)
Ciao
Elmar
www.elladan.de (http://www.elladan.de/)
www.stronghold-terrain.de (http://www.stronghold-terrain.de/)
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Excellent work, with rich colors and far cheaper than buying cornfields and grass mats from the railroad modeling store! And you can just use it as a blanket after a long day at the demo table ;)
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I think I shall make a copy of this and put it in How To...
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I think I shall make a copy of this and put it in How To...
Good Man!
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So when do we get part 2?
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It looks very impressive, well done!
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Hello,
and thank you all for the nice comments. Sadly it lasts longer than expected - but now part II of my tutorial is finished. I hope you like it.
Painting/Drybrushing the dirt road and the earth grounds
The next pictures show the paints, brushes and other materials I used for painting and drybrushing the dirt roads and earth grounds.
- As mentioned above I used not to expensive hobby akrylic paints from LUKAS. The colour tones spanned from a light ochre/dark yellow over medium und dark brown to black. I also used an ivony white (sadly not shown on the second picture).
- I usually use a simple page of paper as my pallet and squeeze small amounts of the paint on it. The technique for colouring the fur with a brush is a kind of drybrushing. So I can mix and wipe off the most paint from the brush on the paper pallet in one go.
- I use brushes with stiff synthetic bristles and a wide of 2,5 - 4,0 cm. They can be bought in the DIY shop, are quite inexpensive and are easy to be cleaned.
- I also recomment to wear latex gloves (medical supply) when doing the "drybrushing". You have to hold the area of the fur matt you are working on with one hand while you rub the colour into the syntetic fur with the other. Otherwise your hand will be perfectly camouflaged with the colours of your mat :-).
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_34.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_35.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_36.jpg)
The following picture shows the paper pallet at the start of the painting process. You can see that I took small amounts of two colours, mixed them and wiped off most of the paint from the brush.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_37.jpg)
I first stroked gently most of the paint on the upper parts of the syntethic fur of a small area. Then I worked the paint with many strong strokes from different directions into the fur. The longer the fur is the more strokes and more power is needed to colour it down to the ground. It is most importent not to use to much paint in one go! I only can recommend to better colour the fur in two or three steps of procedure with less paint on the brush than to ruin the effect by clumping the fasers with to much paint.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_38.jpg)
The next picture shows the result after the first gentle stroke - befor the paint has been worked and rubbed into the fur.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_39.jpg)
At this point I tested the look with a painted piece of copplestone road laid on top of the dark brown coloured area for the road. I realised that it would much better to colour the subsurface of the road with green instead of brown because a small stripe remained visible and didn't looked right. So I changed my mind and started to "drybrush" the edges of the roads with greens an ochres instead. The use colours and the result can be seen in the next pictures.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_40.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_41.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_42.jpg)
Contrary to my my first plan I decided to do even the three parts of the road, that would be covered with the cast copplestone roads pieces later, like a dirtroad. This would be more effort and more time-consuming. But the deadline was still some days away and the extra effort would make the mat much more flexible for later use .
So I started to scorch the short fibers with my lighter again. But it was harder and more time-consuming to achieve the wished effects because of the not quite dry paint on the fur.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_43.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_44.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_45.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_46.jpg)
I used smaller brushes with stiff bristles to colour the ruts. The ground colour was a good covering layer of dark brown. Then followed some drybrushes in lighter browns and sand.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_47.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_48.jpg)
With some scissors I corrected some details, especially when the srtipes of gras between the ruts had been left to high. To cut some fasers away is also the best way to correct areas where to dark colours had been accidently applied to the fur on the edges of the dirt roads.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_53.jpg)
With the ruts being painted in browns it was time to colour the gras between them in different shades of green and yellow. I used a smaller brush with stiff bristles again.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_49.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_50.jpg)
This was the last step of the painting process. The next two pictures show the remnants of paint on the paper pallet and the used brushes before cleaning.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_51.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_52.jpg)
With the painting done, I took some pictures. The terrain mat could be used at this state. The following detail and overfiew shots show clearly the interesting effect of the different shades of green. So far I am very pleased with the result so far.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_54.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_55.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_56.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_58.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_59.jpg)
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_61.jpg)
The next picture shows my first testfit with the buildings and some of the painted copplestone road pieces.
(http://www.elladan.de/065%20Tutorial%20Furmat/Tutorial_Furmat_62.jpg)
End of Part II - but not finally finished
Part III will contain some further detailing of the dirt roads, the construction of the substructure for small humps and some additional terrainpieces.
Thank you for your interest. I hope you like it
Elmar
www.elladan.de (http://www.elladan.de)
www.stronghold-terrain.de (http://www.stronghold-terrain.de)
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fantastic tutorial, more than useful again!
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This is really good. Food for thought indeed. I really wanna see some close ups with minis stood on it.
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This is great. With your permission I am going to tidy it up an post it in How to.
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Such inspirational stuff!
Does anyone know where we could buy this fur in the UK?
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WOW! Really awesome tutorial!
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WOW! Really awesome tutorial!
Indeed, I need to go through this with my second try at it :)
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This is great stuff and exactly what I need and have been asking about for ages 8) 8) 8).
Darrell.