This forum is such a great inspiration when it comes to board building and terrain making and this is my modest contribution
The base of the idea started out with me reading the great zombie threads by Uti and Vyper (and probably a couple of more, sorry if I forgot your names!). And after playing some Left 4 Dead 2, with a swamp level, I decided that it would be great to do a zombie game based in the strange outbacks.
I also have a large collection of Darkest Africa minis, so I thought I should have a great season finale with chasing dinousaurs in some unexplored swamp in the middle of the jungle. And obviously a Chtuluesque game with isolated villages and all that stuff.
Since I'm one of those idiots that prefer the boards to have integral terrain, I decided directly that I needed to do a board with modular pieces of terrain.
I started out with the first board (out of 4) so I could get some feeling of the build and to minimize mistake-damages (screwing up one board instead of 4 due to bad planning and stuff like that).
So, with a great "This is going to be awesome"-feeling in my chest, I went to the closest DIY-store.
Unfortunately, they didn't have to usual pink foam, so I had to settle with some Styrofoam. But hey, it was cheap...
My initial plan was to buy one sheet that was 30mm thick and then a second one that was 20mm thick. The 20mm thick was supposed to be cuttet up and glued directly on the other board to form small islands and the river system. The DIY-shop didn't have these thicknesses, so I settled with a 50mm board as I thought that I could easily cut out the system by hand. I mean, how difficult could it be?...
Once back home, I started the rather stupid task of trying to dig out the contours.
That was just difficult, and I just ended up with small white pellets all over the room...
So my solution was to get one of my scalpels that have a blade which is 20mm long and do a lot of horizontal and vertical lines so I could peel off the small cubes by hand.
That did work, but it did take some time (about one hour at least) and didn't really add up to a positive experience at all.
But, I did in the end actually manage to scrape out the contours needed for this board.
Than I slapped on some filler mixed with water to keep down all the white pellets that tend to fall of from time to time.
First a second layer of filler, then came the fun part of marking out all the terrain pieces and where the should fit (not even 30% accurate in the end, but hey).
The brown painted part was originally the size of the hill/cliff that I wanted near the water to break up the board a bit. It turned out to be tiny, so I decided that big is great, so I did it 4 times larger in the end.
About this time I decided that I need trees, and that I should use the great tutorial done by Lt. Hazel
A close up on the "action" encounters I'm integrating onto the board directly. In the modern zombie setting this will be a downed helicopter with crew and zombie virus...
At this point I had come to the conclusion that the board would be really difficult to move or transport, so I needed to make the trees on bases. So I ordered 30 or so 30mm bases to base the trees on (I've so far made 25 trees, and I've realised that I need about 50...). As I want the pieces to fit well with the board, I started to mark up where the trees and bushes should go. I also finished the first of the cliffs (the other one was later on cut down to a minimal as I did really underestimate the thickness of the cork bark).
So at last, time to throw on the concrete-mix. Its a mix of filler, PVA glue, sand and some paint so I could see where I was painting. All credit goes to Captain Blood for this
Now the board finally starts to take shape!
I realised that my major mistake (so far) was that I've cut the swamp to deep. And that meant that I couldn't put extra filler, as the weight would probably break it in two if I moved it...
So, I decided to sand half of it an make the larger part a river and thus ensuring that I was clear of using 4 bottles of Water effect (which is heavy as well).
I'm a lazy sod, and as the club is home to macho men with a soft side for loud toys, I bought a paint gun and hooked it up to the monster known as the club compressor...
And than filled the board with paint. The whole operation took about 3 minutes. Then I obviously needed to go over the stuff again quickly with a brush to make sure that everyting was coloured. I also painted the cork by hand.
This is all for now, hopefully I'll get some more pics later this week (I've done some more, but forgot to take photos).
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April 29, 2024, 01:14:31 PM
November 25, 2010, 11:01:02 PM
