HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 4

Ok, we already went through a lot of steps. First we prepared the six basic modules and shaped some with hills and then we started coating everything with our structure paint. Now it's time to adding detail to the whole thing. This part is again not really magical, but you should take care in this process. The most importan thing is that every module must be completely (!!!) dry. We had a kind of "oven" on my balcony on which the modules could dry for a complete summer day.

Drying station for our modules

After that, we basecoated the side of the hills in black and checked if the brown undercoat was even and that the green of the styrodur didn't look through the paint. Then the drybrushing fun begins! :-) Drybrush all rock with some graytones and then all of the modules in layer after layer of lighter browns. I just used the tinting paint and mixed in more and more white. And yes, this looked somewhat pinky because my brown had red in it, but that wasn't bad at all. The paint will darken a good amount with drying, so there was no problem at all. Try not to be too regular in the highlights, if there are some differences in shading, this adds to the more realistic look.

Drybrushed hill modules

Then there comes the messy part of this part: applying the static grass... This makes more fun, if you have a friend to help you with. Especially if you have no grass applicator which helps you to raising the gras. Many people do one big mistake at this step: They just sprinkle the gras on the glue. Bad idea. This just looks like green dots not like grass spots. There is a better solution to that: Companies like Noch offer grass applicator bottles for the job. But you can make this a bit cheaper by crafting this yourself. Just take an old soda bottle or fabric softener bottle, wash it, drill some holes into the cap and fill it with your static gras. Then shake it to get some static charge and press the bottle together to shoot the fibres out, right into the glue. Hope this is explained good enough, in the next picture you can see my bottle in action:

Static grass being applied

By shooting the charged grass into the glue, the fabres raise themselves up which gives a way more realistic look and a much better coverage and firmness of the grass patches. Just do this with random spots and don't think too much about how they should be arranged.. In the end, you can add patches if the look doesn't suit you well. And that is all the magic that has to happen until you've got your handmade gaming table:

Final gaming board

I just made a fast picture with my lizard riders and my swamp to show how the whole thing will look in daylight.

Posing with my swamp

This is it. You can use some matt varnish to seal everything or use a very thinned white glue layer applied by spraying it on. But this is completely to your liking, I didn't do it and saved me the work, the structure paint is stable enough in my opinion.

I hope you enjoyed this HowTo series. If so please leave a comment or even follow this blog, I hope there will come some more things in the future :-)

So long,
Paradox0n

P.S.: If you missed one of the parts, here is just a short linklist to every part of this series:
Modular Gaming Table - Part 1
Modular Gaming Table - Part 2
Modular Gaming Table - Part 3
Modular Gaming Table - Part 4