In this installment we'll get the bulk of the painting finished up. After that, it's on to details and finishing touches (probably in further blog posts). These steps move much faster than the construction. Which is good, because construction was a bit of a ball-buster.
Some notes on Paint:Paint is important. Maybe the most important part of the board.
The colors you choose are going to be tied into (and, perhaps, affecting) the pallets of your models and terrain. The colors are going to take your game board from a bunch of multicolored card squares on a piece of wood, to a bad-ass concrete wasteland.
The type of paint you choose is going to affect things like overall cost, time spent waiting for drying and overall durability of the finished product.
Paint Type:Before we can choose colors, we need to discuss types of paint. If you've ever painted a miniature before, you're well aware that those little acrylic model paints are the way to go. They're fast drying, come in lots of colors/effects and are relatively cheap. You're probably most familiar with them as well.
However, we're talking about painting 16 square feet of gaming table. A little ounce-and-a-half paint pot isn't going to cut it. Hell, 10 of the little guys won't be enough. All of the qualities that make your regular mini paint great for miniatures are terrible for a gaming board. Primarily, the small size of the jars coupled with the 'fragile'* nature of the paint make it terrible for a high traffic play area.
*By fragile, I mean that since you are ideally working with very thin coat of paint, the paint will rub off if you don't dull coat you models. Since we're building a large surface that is meant to be played on, it will see much more 'handling' and general wear and tear than any model could ever reasonably expect to see.
For our purposes, we need a paint that us both cheaper than model paint, drys quickly and is durable. We need latex paint. It fits all those qualifications and comes in a dizzying array of colors.
Color Selection:You have a few options here. They all involve going to a hardware store.
Option A: go to the premixed paint aisle and select colors from whats comes ready to go in can. This is very cheap, but you have very limited color selection. The only thing worth getting here is a solid flat black.
Option B: Go to the paint sample area and select some colors from the various chits. The hardware store will mix thees up to order and you have a ton of options. Often times, you can come pretty close to matching a favorite model paint color.
Option C: Often times, the hardware store will have a color matching service. If you have some colors of model paint you absolutely love or need to use, bring in a dry sample of the color and the hardware store can match it.
I went for option B. I needed some rich brown or green grays and non of my model paints fit the bill. It's also much easier to get colors from a pre-existing pallet. I choose 3 warmish grays from the Behr line that I am quite happy with (this is important since custom paint is non-returnable). 10 bucks a quart was bit more than I wanted to spend, but hey, thats how it is. Fun factoid: An equivalent amount of Citadel paint would have about 700+ dollars. Yikes.
I got my three grays based on a base coat and two highlights plan. I'd base coat over the black primer with the darkest gray, do a heavy highlight with the middle color and then a lighter highlight with the lightest color. there would also be a black wash in thrown in as well to add depth.
Another note: latex paint comes in a variety of finishes as well (matte, flat, gloss, etc). Get whatever suites your needs. I got a flat finish to help with the concrete effect I wanted.
I got way more paint than I needed, but considering I plan on using it for basing my models and for painting all the terrain I intend to make, its a pretty good deal.
Working With Latex Paint:Is pretty easy. It washes up with water and drys fairly fast (you only need to wait about 2-ish hours between coats). Just make sure you give the can a good shake or stir before using it (just like any paint). I big brush and a drop cloth are also handy. We have 16 square feet of surface to cover. A two inch brush will be quite handy, if not a bit more messy.
Well, that was way more time spent on paint than I wanted. And with no pictures. More to come.
In the above picture you can kinda see the areas I focused on for the sand. As an alternative or addition to some of the sand, you could mix some sand in with the latex paint and then paint on rough patches. A little more prep work, but a pretty cool effect. The sand patches ended up looking pretty good, but were not exactly what I had intended.
The basic idea is/was to create a series of geometric shapes using only right angles and then glue them down with a 1/16 inch gap between. Its actually desirable to have more than just rectangles as well as varying the distance between them in order to create a more visually interesting board. I started marking out some shapes on the card stock and cut them out whenever I needed the next one.
It's important to not get all crazy and up an entire sheet of the card at once. The idea is to break up overly long straight lines, so I took a more organic approach and only cut out a few shapes at a time. Its also a good idea to start at a corner to ensure that you glue the shapes down parallel to the edges of the board.
As you may or may not be able to see from the picture, the wood glue got everywhere. It took a long time to dry and, as I later found out, created some bubbling once I painted it. Do yourself a favor here and use super glue.
Vents are a bit more complicated, so I'll start here first. Once you pick you spot, take some measurements and cut some lengths of the plastic strips you have to create a frame. I recommend a thinner plastic because you're going to have two layers of the stuff and you don't want it to ride too high over the rest of the tiles. Next, cut a section of the wire mesh to fit in the frame (with no overlap). You can try gluing it down now, but it's hard and unnecessary. Next, measure and cut strips to create a second frame that is slightly smaller than the first. Glue these pieces on top of the first. This is the easy way to make sure the mesh gets locked down. Next cut some lengths of plastic rod to create rivits and glue 'em down.
Now, using some sort of gouging tool (I had a few cheap-o wood carvers from many moons ago that I used), start digging out the crater. Remember to create a bowl-ish depression and to not dig too deep. I also added some plastic rodes as bent up rebar, peices of heavyier plastic as exploded chunks as well as some bits of plastic/card stock around the crater as more debris.
The Deathjack is almost ready to go. Just a few more parts to paint up (the hands) and then attach and I've got 154 points of unstoppable killing machine done. He's already based since I had to do so in order to get his legs assembled.
