Building a DIY Board

Jael here.

For a long time I was keen to build a table I could use for casual games at home. Over the past few months I had been slowly building various pieces of terrain with view to having a modular board which would pack away into a cupboard when not in use, but still look more convincing than a green cloth over the dining room table. 

So as soon as I was able, I headed down to the local hardware shop and acquired three 2x4 foot 3mm MDF boards, some high-density extruded foam, a very large bottle of PVA glue and various other odds and ends required to complete the project.

I started out by placing some buildings and scatter terrain on the bare boards to get an idea of the scale and to begin marking out roads. As it turned out, the river sections were an almost exact fit to stretch across the board, so I decided (particularly as they were getting damaged in storage) to embed them into the board itself. I decided not to do this with the railway sections as I wanted the board to be useful for games in pre-industrial/fantasy settings as well.

With the roadways drawn in with a marker, I set about giving some texture to the board. Using a heavy coating of glue, I sprinkled a mixture of aquarium sand and model railway ballast (incidentally this is my basing mixture for miniatures) over the boards. Allowing 24 hours to dry, I then brushed heavily watered PVA across the surface to seal it.

With this done, I glued the river sections and bridge in place, and used spakfiller to create a subtle gradient in order to mak the edges of the river.

Now that the filler and sand/grit was dry, I brushed the whole surface down with watered down raw umber poster paint from the two-dollar shop.

Once poster paint had dried, I lightly sprayed black and white paint from a can across the surface in order to provide some contrast.

The first coat of grass was Woodland Scenics coarse turf. This is, as the name suggests, quite liable to clump up, but this I not an issue. Subsequent applications of finer grade turf blend this and create a pleasing randomness. The roads have been painted with a rough coating of dark earth texture paint.

The next layer is a fine turf, again Woodland Scenics, in a green blend. As you can see, this is quite a vivid green with not a lot of variation.

To get more tonal variation, I started adding patches of yellow grass, paying particular attention to the edges of the roads.  

The final step was to use a burnt grass fine turf, again Woodland Scenics, to blend the different sections of the board together and create a more unified effect. 

After a few days drying time, I set everything up on the floor of my apartment and snapped some pics.

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