I really love painting miniatures and making terrain. Not that I’m really good at it, but my results are good enough for the “look at them from 1 meter away” use case that is what we need for tabletop and roleplaying gaming.

For years, I’ve accumulated odds and ends and various miniatures, but since I’ve started playtesting Raiders of Arismyth in earnest, I quite kicked things up a notch.

My latest project: A round terrain surface for open terrain scenarios. Woods, open road, fields, and so on. Basically, this is a roughly round foamcore disc with a diameter of about 60cm. The underside has a few bits to easily center and hold it onto a cheap lazy susan, so I can rotate the whole thing easily on the table.

For the surface, I first attached a magnetic blackboard sheet to the whole thing, and then painted on a generous amount of PVA glue. I had cut out lots of 28mm cardboard squares and stuck them on in a mostly regular stone tiles pattern. I do want to have a combat grid on it after all!

To unify and seal the surface, I mixed up Mod Podge with a very very dark brown paint (which turned out nearly black) and baking soda for texture, slathing that all over the thing. To hide brushmarks I a) “dipped” the brush all over the place, and b) sprinkled more baking soda on to it.

This is how the result currently looks:

The next step is to get rid of the extra baking soda, then drybrush the whole thing with various shades of gray, brown and green, to give it a more “natural” look. Again, the aim is not to be completely life-like, but to have something that is a good visual aid and looks decent on the table. Also, it’s no-effort-November after all.

In the end, I applied static grass to make the whole thing even less uniform. I did splurge on a cheap static grass applicator. So cheap, it comes with numerous reviews saying to be careful with it, as it retains the charge for a moment and can lead to a … shocking experience! So I took the precaution of not touching any wires at all, not licking them either, and to wear gloves, just in case. And immediately after using the thing, it went back into the box!

Anyway, The plate already looks qutie nice I think:

It’ll need some sort of sealing in, to make it more robust. I could buy that stuff from some stores, but I’m trying to a spraybottle with diluted mod podge for that. Let’s see how it turns out!

This is the still-wet plate, after I’ve spraid a very generous amount of watered down Mod Podge onto it. The stuff dries clear, so the result should be good. In order to preserve the grid, I added thin lines of white sand here and there, and then added more watered down Mod Podge.

Also: Initially, I had the bright idea of diluting the Mod Podge with isopropanol, thinking that would evaporate faster, and thus be dry much quicker. Turns out that this is actually a terribly BAD idea! Mixed with alcohol, Mod Podge congeals, which isn’t really conducive to having in a spray bottle… 🙂

And in hindsight, I probably diluted the stuff too much – nearly a day later, and the plate is still a bit moist. But overall, I really like the look of the final thing, especially once I populated it with a few terrain pieces and miniatures.

As you can see, I am really experimenting here A LOT. I just grab whatever I have at hand. The paints for this are sort of the cheapest acrylic paints I could find in the store, the cardboard is harvested from various boxes, the baking soda is something we use for cleaning and such. The lazy susan under it is unaltered, and can be used in any other way, or I could later toss differently styled plates onto it.

This was a low-effort project, but for about three to four hours work in total, spread over four days, I’m happy with it.