Making a terrain board

After the recent heavy defeat of my skaven, I realised that I need a bigger board to play on. My current 3’x3’ board is fine for skirmishes or up to about 500 points a side, but anything much bigger than that and it’s really too small. Hence my new project to make myself a 6’x4’ table.

Like battling on a pocket handkerchief

 

My requirements are that it be relatively quick to make, looks good, and can be stored easily. I prefer using scatter terrain over having terrain moulded into the board – the latter option looks great but I would get bored playing on the same terrain over and over. Even if the table is modular, you’re always going to have that hill somewhere on the board.

Which is good, because a plan surface is a lot quicker and easier to make! I’m going to make three 2’x4’ boards, which will make it easy to store and give me a 4’x4’ option for smaller games. Having done some research, I’ve decided to texture the boards using polyfilla, following this tutorial from Mel Bose (aka the Terrain Tutor). I’ll get a 6’ folding table to sit them on for games.

A trip to the local hardware shop on the weekend yielded two 2’x4’x12mm mdf boards. I’d have got a third, but the other boards all had a bit more bowing to them than I was happy with and I was worried they wouldn’t all sit flush. Not too worried, as I was planning on doing one as a test so I can pick up another board soon.

Let's get cracking...

 

The process for texturing the board is pretty simple. Add water to the top of a container of polyfilla and mix lightly. Brush the water on to the board. Brush again, using a thicker paste. Stipple the board with polyfilla. Allow to dry. Stipple again. This should lead to a nice organic texture that is till flat enough to stand figures on. Naturally, the tutorial has much more detail on how to do this.

Here’s where I got to with the texture. Not quite the coverage of the board in the tutorial – Mel doesn’t have any mdf showing, but I’m still happy with it.

Nearly forgot to take a photo before I painted it!

 Painting was straightforward – dark brown paint from the hardware shop as a base coat, drybrushed with a progressively lighter mix of the base and a light brown, up to straight light brown. The drybrushing was a bit heavy in places but I figured a lot of it would be covered in flock so I didn’t have to be too neat. Again, I’ll be a bit more careful on the next boards.

Basecoat...

...drybrushed...

 To flock it I painted about a quarter at a time with slightly diluted PVA glue, then sprinkled with flock. I added some colour variation with a darker flock, which for the next boards I’ll concentrate on blending in a bit better.

...and done!

I’m pretty happy with the finished product! It just needs a spray with matt varnish to fix the flock and I’ll paint the back at some point to seal it (should have done that up front but I was too impatient to start texturing!). Total time spent wouldn't have been much more than an hour excluding drying time.

Hopefully I’ll get the other two boards done in the next couple of weeks…