(My apologies if Car Wars stuff goes in the Post-Apocalypse board.) This past weekend I scored a few 12" square 5-mm thick pressed particle tiles, one side of which was glossy smooth, for just fifty cents a piece. I figured eight feet of highway should be enough for a running car wars battle (in 3x scale as I use 5th edition).
The first step was paiting the roads with gray primer and sprinkling on fine sand. Then I painted the off-road areas and covered them with a fine and coarse sand mix. Here's a shot at this point in construction:
This set up gives me a total of 4-feet of perfectly straight road. The two intersection tiles double as straightaways with little doglegs in them and shallow corners. That gives me six feet of straight road; you can pick up the last tile and drop it in front to make the highway as long as you want. Anyone four or five feet back from the leader is effectively out of the fight anyway. The last two tiles are really sharp corners for extra fun.
After a second coat of primer and dull brown paint to seal up the sand texture, it was time for the lane markings. I went with 1” wide lanes, probably too narrow for the 1” bases that mount my cars on, but since there won’t be a lot of head-on traffic, and most cars won’t be lined up right next to each other anyway… it’ll look fine.
The reddish paint is intentional - these are meant to be local (Hawaiian) highways, and the volcanic rock is iron rich lending most places a red dirt look. I've got to paint in the sandy shoulders of the pavement, stain and seal (the Dip) the boards, and add in the grass and whatnot, but it's coming along quite nice. I also hope to make some off-road terrain for visual appeal; palm trees, rocks, pineapple fields, shave ice stand, billboards, etc, should keep it from looking like the same six feet of highway. Here's an in-progress shot of my first two billboards:
Gotta sand and paint up the bases yet. Those are 20mm figs for scale.
Thanks for looking, I'll update this thread with future progress. If anyone wants to see more detail or bigger shots, ojust check my blog.