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Hello chaps!

Between my current Tyranids project, my lil' kid and tons of garden work I'm working on my old Realm of Battle board.
I bought and painted the board two years ago and the look of it always bugged me a bit as the paintjob just wasn't adequate for a 200 Euro plastic board.
Now the whole thing will be covered with a PVA+sand mixture and all terrain pieces will be integrated into the look of the ground surface.

I already finished the first square and I'm currently working on some additional terrain for the other pieces.




The board will consist of the following parts:
- Skyshield with tank repair station and bunker
- battlefield with craters, lots of low cover and a wrecked imperial basilisk
- Two squares with civil buildings (one finished)
- A huge scratchbuild highway bridge
- Craters with a generic building

With this setup I have two dense terrain pieces (skyshield/battlefield), two medium ones (civil buildings) and two pieces with very few terrain (bridge/generic building). In addition the huge terrain pieces were placed at the edges of the board so I can easily switch from dense terrain to an open battlefield by just turning some squares. Variety ftw!

Most of the terrain pieces are already painted and glued on the board, I only have to finish the skyshield bunker and the bridge. This will be my first adventure to plasticard and I'm pretty curious about it. I already made some drawings and measurements, bought some different plasticard pieces and will start working on it tomorrow.

To finish my first post here's a small step-by-step guide for the first piece:
- Paint your terrain pieces before adding them to the board
- Fix the terrain with PVA glue
- Mix PVA glue and siliceous sand (around 50:50 I'd guess)
- Get dirty! Smear the mixture on the board using a flat piece of plastic, for tricky parts I used my wet fingers for it
- Let it dry for while until it starts to get sticky
- Rough the surface with some flat piece of plastic (if its still too wet the rough surface will get smooth again within minutes, just wait a little more and repeat the process but don't wait until the upper layer gets completely dry!!)
- Stick some bits into the sand mixture
- Wait 24h
- Paint the board with an airbrush using 4 different colours (black/dark brown/medium brown/bleached bone)
- Highlight the surface with skull white
- Stick some army painter tuft to some random places
- finished!

Looks great I like how you pointed out the details!

Thanks, chap!

Good news everyone, the second part of the board is finished!
Compared to the first part I used a slightly watered down PVA/Sand mix and the workability was way better. I was able to finish the texture in about 30 minutes, the surrounding area looks like a mess now but I'm pretty pleased with the look!

WARNING - Big picture ahead (2.5 MB):




Here are some pictures of the terrain pieces for the skyshield part (still some WIP):


The first two pictures are showing my first adventure into plasticard. I just wanted to try out different tools to work with it, the result is a maintenance ramp for tanks.
Third picture is some cheap wire fence made out of plasticard and some etched brass.
The barrels and ammo crates are from the GW accessory sprue, the dirty and damaged space wolf trike was already painted and I just weathered a bit with vallejo pigments.

Just out curiosity... Why didn't you build a modular board out of cheaper material?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I mean using something other than RoB board for basis.

Your table does look awesome.

Old Man Ultramarine wrote:Just out curiosity... Why didn't you build a modular board out of cheaper material?
I mean using something other than RoB board for basis.
Your table does look awesome.

Thanks, old man!

Good question as it would have worked pretty much the same way w/o spending 200 bucks on the board itself.
First reason is that I already owned it and it has built in elevations which fit perfectly when combined to a big hill.
I'm also a huge fan of the new FW Imperial Strongpoint, by adding this plus two more generic tiles it will give me a very nice table for apoc games (3x3)!
I know - this could all have been achieved without the RoB Board but I won't count me as a good craftsman so I took the easy way.

Wow, that looks really stunning man. Not really modular or easily stored, but hell with that! This is too lovely to care about such mundane issues!