Land Worth Fighting For

Even though the remodeling and cleanup are done, I still have not been able to set up a good place to paint so unfortunately I am yet to put brush to miniature this month. I am happy to report that I have nonetheless been painting since last Thursday as I am finally working on my Realm of Battle Gameboard, otherwise known as a car payment. So all that dithering about what theme to go with amounted to nothing really as I have opted to go with the standard pastoral look of green fields. Versatility won out over the more creative considerations as I now plan on having it replace my other two foam boards which would thus free up lots of space. Therefore I need this board to be usable across multiple game systems and settings, hence my decision to not do anything wild. Besides, they're called battlefields, right?

Agents of the Inquisition arrive to inspect my progress.

I painted the first panel of my board using the brown and ochre paints included in the Games Workshop scenery kit. I can already tell I'll run out of those colors long before I finish this project, not to mention a bunch of other paint pots. This thing really is a huge amount of plastic and just eats up paint as well as flock. I'm covering over most of the painted areas which now seems kind of silly to me, but the grassy look will have to do. I understand now why so many other people's boards that I've seen on the internet have been left completely bare other than the paint. I thought my test panel looked pretty good after just a basecoat and a couple of layers of drybrushing and thought about stopping there. Once I started painting the big blocks of stone I felt like I had committed myself to flocking so as to hide my total lack of transition between the dirt and stone. I'm sure, however, that I will be more than satisfied with my flocked board once I can put some sections together.

The first 2'x2' panel is finished.

Since most of the board will end up being covered in flock, which at the time of purchase I believed was more autumnal hued but oh well, the features left on it for personalization include a few large areas of stone, some cliff faces, and those infamous skull pits. I don't want to do anything so unusual or extreme as to distract from the overall pastural feel of the board and so I started by painting the stone with, appropriately enough, Dehneb Stone. It's a light, almost chalky colored grey and so my plan was to stain it using a variety of colorful washes, going from Gryphonne Sepia to Thraka Green, and then lastly Leviathan Purple. (Hmmm.... yellow, purple, and green. Does that mean my theme is Mardi Gras?) I'm pleased with how the stone areas turned out with the first one, though I have been going a bit heavier with the washes on my second panel. It started out as an accident as I forgot to thin the Gryphonne Sepia but I have since decided it won't look bad to have some variation here. That't what I'm telling myself, at least.

Apply wash then wipe off, repeat until satisfied or bored.

I am yet to deal with the cliff faces but will most likely give them the same treatment as the horizontal patches of stone, perhaps changing up the palette of washes slightly but otherwise painting them basically the same way. I am currently working on the second of the flat panels and therefore I'm now getting to deal with my first of the skull pits. I'm not doing anything fancy with the skulls themselves nor the stones around the pit, other than the same set of washes, but I do plan on filling the pits with resin to simulate water. I won't be doing that until the very last step of this project so I still have time to decide whether or not I want to tint the resin. I'm leaning toward not for the sake of simplicity, but I thought it might also be interesting to tint each one a different color for a more otherworldly effect. We'll see about that, but my laziness will probably win out. I'm leaving for a wedding at the end of this week so my goal is to be done with all the painting and flocking before I go, leaving the resin to be poured upon my return.