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Finally getting around to painting up my Secret Weapon terrain tiles. I got 16 for Dark age. Pattern I grabbed was the Scrap Yard as its fitting for post apoc.

Currently I put 2 coats on all 16 tiles using a large brush and folk art brown acrylic paint.

Most tiles of scrap pieces half buried or sheets of metal prodding out/ tires laying about. That's the easy part, silver/ black, washes and rust them up.

The problem

How do I make the Dirt ground itself look good? Do I need to wash the whole board? Trying not to spend a fortune on Nuln oil to wash all 16 12'x12' tiles. That's the process I'm most used to with minis though. Wash, drybrush a lighter brown and done? Ive never painted a board before though so wondering if its different with such large surface area?

For reference of what I'm talking about

To make the dirt look good, drybrush one or two lighter brown craft paints over the existing paint job. You can tailor the colors to fit your overall design scheme (by adding redder browns near scrap metal, for example). If you want to do a cheap wash over the entire board, go with a Dakka classic:


Read the original thread here.

So would you say a wash is required on the dirt?

It largely depends on the texture of the board. If it has well distinct peaks (like, say, sand would have if you glued it to the board) then you can get away with drybrushing and not washing because the drybrush picks up those distinct edges. If the detail isn't as sharp, a wash tends to be better because drybrushing alone won't give you the sharp contrast you're probably aiming to see.

If you have an airbrush, you can spray the board one brown and then pick a couple of other browns and a light beige and airbrush in a sort of random patchy way then use a wash to give you more defined shades. Using multiple browns gives it a more realistic look and adds to the "visual interest" so it doesn't look too monotonous.

If you don't have an airbrush, you can do much the same thing, just substitute "airbrush" with "drybrush" in the above paragraph.

Have a look on youtube or google for dioramas, specifically with keywords like "ww2 diorama" or "tank diorama" or something like that and people will often run through how they created certain looks.

Washes are really just another name for stains. For a project this size i would head to the local home improvement store and grab a 1qt can of wood stain (color of your choice for dirt, dark, light, whatever looks good to you) and a bottle of floorshine to thin it out and get to mixing. Watch the video posted by Nodri as far as proper ratios. Grab a big brush and get to work

 quickfuze wrote:
Washes are really just another name for stains.

Not really, each product is going to be a bit different, stains typically have some glossy finishing agent (like shellac, varnish, lacquer and so forth). Artists inks are specifically designed to be very high colour density and as such a bottle of artist's ink will go a long way in making a wash, so I'd just stick to that myself, using Les's wash recipes you can make about a quarter to a half a litre of wash from a single 30ml bottle of artist's ink, if you want to go crazy you can buy the 180ml bottles of artists ink and make tons of wash.

EDIT: Vallejo and P3 also make inks, they're more expensive than artist inks but sometimes easier to get your hands on. Once you thin the ink down to a wash-like consistency a single bottle goes quite a long way, probably still need a couple of bottles to do a whole table though. Note that Army Painter's inks aren't really "inks" like artist inks, Vallejo inks or P3 inks, Army Painter inks are actually more like GW's shades or Vallejo's "washes".