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Hey all,

A new year means a new project, and since I'm currently without a good gaming table and a friend has a bunch of plastic 40k terrain he's painting, I decided why not build one? And furthermore, why not make a blog of it so people can see?

I only two real restrictions going into this project:

It must be easy to store

It must serve both Kill Team and Gaslands

Easy to store means no real built-in terrain. I don't want it to be just a featureless board with painted sand and a few tufts of grass here and there, though. Still, it has to be pretty flat.

Easy to store also means small, which is why I'm going with a Kill Team board rather than a normal 40k one. 22"x30" is a lot easier to slide under a bed than even a 4'x4'.

It also should be large enough for most Gaslands games. If you don't know, Gaslands is a Mad Max-style car combat game from Osprey played with Hot Wheels cars. Gaslands is a dramatically different scale than 40k, but if I keep the details general enough, it should be fine.

So here are a couple pics of the empty board. I've used some 1/8" door skin for the top and a couple 1x2 boards for the sides and bracing. Also way too many screws. Hopefully the mid-board braces will keep it from warping, but I'm not planning on just gluing sand down, so that should keep warpage to a minimum.

Okay, part 2. Finally something worth talking about!

I decided I wanted a road on the board, partly because Gaslands, but partly because I've always appreciated a well-done road and have never had one myself. Plus it's a great wat to add some texture to the table without a lot of height.

The road was made from cork sheets cut into 3 3/4" wide pieces (because why make cork panels actually 12" square, that's silly!). It's a good scale for both Gaslands and 40k without it dominating the table. I then broke it into rough pieces to simulate millennia of wear and tear, and scuffed all the edges with a big screw to rough them up. I saw a video that used a drywall saw to rough the edges of cork, which would have been more civilized, but I don't have one and the screw worked remarkably well. I then reassembled the road, gluing it to the board with adhesive caulk.

Maybe a arroyo or shallow ravine if you want a little more integral detail? The cork road looks good. Will follow this.

Understand about wanting your table to do double duty. While I used to buy any terrain that took my fancy, I am now trying to theme it. Since a number of armies I own (or purchased and have yet to assemble) require desert basing it is now desert hills, palm trees and MidEast, Egyptian, or Hellenistic buildings. (If I ever get around to my In Her Majesty's Name figures can use 19th Century European colonial too.)

Thanks for the compliment. I'm not going with anything subterranean since there's not really anywhere to cut into, and building a hill up to then cut into it would make a big mess. I do like the idea of a ravine that the Gaslands cars could jump over, so I'll keep that in mind for the next one.

Boy, we need some more texture on that board. Unfortunately I didn't get any pics of it before I started applying the ground texture (more on that later), so you'll have to be happy with in-progress shots.

I took three areas of the board and added some underlying texture that would be blended into the surface later.

First was some redwood chips for a rock outcrop in the bottom right of the first pic. After cooking the chips in a 200 degree oven for about an hour and a half (to kill any creepy crawlies) I cut them down so they would both have a flat edge to glue to the table and keep a relatively low profile. Then I combined them, jigsaw puzzle-style to make one large piece.

Next, in the upper middle is some roughly cut pieces of plastic needlework mesh. I went to the local fabric store and found pieces with 3 different sizes of holes. This one is basically perforated with tiny holes, and I'll be using it a lot more on future projects. It's not as cheap as the other ones, but you get a lot, considering.

Finally in the upper left is square cut pieces of diamond plate plasticard. Not much else to say about that. I cut it differently from the mesh just to be different. They'll both have their edges covered with spackle and stuff anyway.

The circles drawn on the board are for manhole covers to account for the Tunnels rule in Kill Team. They'll be added later.

All the ground texture has been applied now. I felt like I was frosting a cake.

The stuff has a base of lightweight spackle, fine sand, coarse ballast, cork crumbles from roughing up the roads, static grass, and a touch of water to make it more pliable. Really, the static grass was a waste, as you can't see it at all. I wasn't hoping for tufts of grass, but maybe a few noticeable pieces. Oh well, they wouldn't be visible after I paint everything anyway.

I spread it all with a small putty knife (which took quite a while), and was careful to build up the space on the sides of the road so it didn't have such an abrupt jump from non-road to road. After that, I took a damp sponge brush thing and dabbed the whole thing to give it a softer, more worn down look. It especially helped blend in the wood chips to the ground. Not shown in the pics is the sand/ballast I put in between the cracks in the road, but if you've seen any piece of terrain anywhere, you've seen that effect already.

I'm very pleased with how everything is going, and the whole thing is so light it's kind of unbelievable.

Only a couple more minor details before the painting begins!

Board is looking really good mate. Ground texture looks like it will paint up nicely.

Do you have terrain ready for it, or are you planning on making it as you go?

Thanks!

I've got some stuff from Death Ray Designs to build (and add LEDs to), but for the moment I'll be using a friend's Wall of Martyrs and a couple other things.

Fantastic start man cant wait to see how everything goes.

Looking good!

Only a minor update today before I start painting.

Since in some Kill Team games you can have tunnels, I decided to add them to this board too. They're a little out of scale for the Gaslands stuff, but they can be water outflows or sewage or something.

The tunnel covers are two layers of plasticard, one a solid disc and one a ring with a circle of plastic needlepoint mesh inside it. And did I take a picture of any of the tunnel covers being made? Heck no, you'll have to use your imagination!

Also added was some sand/gravel between the cracks in the roadway.

Fantastic looking, thanks for sharing the pictures.

Back on the work train!

First colors of paint are done, covering all the basic ground. After perusing a ton of 40k/wastelandy boards I decided on a light brown color with a touch of green to give it a bit of a sickly feel. I'm not going for all out nurgly fetidness, just slightly off. Usually I go for straight brown > tan > cream, but I wanted something different this time.

So I decided the base layer should be kind of a dark khaki color and let me tell you, it is impossible to find that as a color in any craft or art store I tried. I really didn't want to mix the colors on the go, but there wasn't really any other option. I also didn't want to get a whole can of house paint (even a small one) from the hardware store. So I found a sort of close color at an art store and just bit the bullet and mixed the color as I went.

One other lesson learned: real artist paint, even though it was still acrylic, is a very different beast from craft paint. It took a ton of water to get it mixed down to a spreadable state.

If you're looking to recreate the colors, I can't give you exact measurements, but it was about 6 parts Raw Umber, 3 parts Stonewedge Green, 1 part Vanilla for the base. Lighter layers were based more around the Stonewedge Green with varying degrees of umber and vanilla. There's no real wrong way to do it; it's all just personal preference. The brands of the paints are in the pic below.

Next the detailing begins, though I may go back and give the whole board a wash with black/brown ink first to give it some more definition. I can't decide yet, though that would probably mean redoing the lighter drybrush layers.

Table is looking really good.

Yes, as someone who has used a lot of craft paint, I agree with your observation about needing to add water. Though it's highly subjective based on brand and age of the paint. And even among craft paint some are higher quality than others. Delta Ceramcoat is really nice for the money.

Thanks for sharing the pictures. Every time I see one of these builds I want to make one. But I'm just not gaming much these days.

Thanks, Cleatus!

A minor painting update today, though I have plans to finish the board by the end of the week. #bestlaidplans

This time I painted the rocks in one corner. They're plain grey, so I just undercoated them with a dark charcoal color and drybrushed them with increasingly lighter colors until I was almost hitting them with pure white on the tips.

I had to go back and touch up the ground color around the outcropping, which really helped it blend back in with the ground.

Next up: the roadway.

Nice work on the table so far . Another idea you could do is Gaslands terrain to cover the tunnel entrances. The race gates as well as turret emplacements could have corners sized to disguise those. Or come up with your own rules for flames to shoot up out of the tunnels on random shift turns, but the cars get points towards the fans favor every time they end a move on them.

Looks great!
Love the road you've done.

How about adding some cacti? Adds a touch of spot colour to the board and would be great for some obscuring terrain in KT. Private would be way too big for headlands though.

Thanks for the tips. I like the flame spurts for Gaslands, and I'll have to write some rules to incorporate those.

Same with the cacti. I'm going to add some tufts of grass here and there for some more color, but I imagine I'll be building some terrain as I go along too.

This is really successful! Both the cork road and the bark rocks came out well. As you consider an all-over wash, I can warn you from my experience that a heavy and fairly bright drybrush should precede it...otherwise you could lose all your hard-won definition. I muddied a large expanse of my terrain boards before I caught the error. If you're mixing your own wash (so you don't invest an entire pot of Agrax), it's tough to get the flow characteristics right. The upside is that you have some great texture to work with, so it really could work... either way this looks great!

I've decided against a wash, mostly because there is real potential to bungle it and ruin all the work that's gone into the board so far. But I'm also not going to because if I let myself, I could just jiggle with it here and there and never actually finish anything. It will never be "perfect," so just get it done.

Speaking of fiddling with parts for too long: the roadway!

I laid down a dark grey color on the roads, think charcoal, and started drybrushing it with lighter grey colors. I added a little light brown in to differentiate it from the rocks, which were straight neutral grey, but it just wasn't turning out like I wanted. I'd purposefully made the edges lighter, but the contrast was too high and it was just a real mess. Not wanting to paint it all black and start again, I put a couple thin washes of black ink to bring all the colors together and decided to work on other parts for a while.

I also used the ink wash on the sides of the road to blend it in with the dirt a little. After the wash I drybrushed again with the lightest dirt color to blend the two. That actually worked pretty well, I feel. It's kind of hard to see in the pics, though.

The first couple pics are after this was done. It's "fine," but not right.

A couple days later I came back to it and drybrushed with slightly different color combinations. Still grey and still brown, but a little more controlled and with a lighter touch. This worked much better and, even though it wasn't 100% what I'd seen in my head, I was happy with it.

I then added the lane stripes with a base of neutral grey followed by a very watered down white color mixed with just a hint of grey. This was still too bright, so I glazed them with very watered down black ink. This both toned down the white and brought out the cracks from the cork.

Here are a few in-progress shots of the various scrap metal pieces buried in the ground. I painted both the same, but ended up with pretty different looks.

First went over each piece with a dark brown, then stippled on a light brown, and finally stippled orange. Then I put streaks of silver in the darker areas, since that was where the rust mostly wouldn't be.

At this point I was really happy with the look of the perforated metal and pleased but not satisfied with the diamond plate. But I still had my magic weapon: Tamiya Smoke. It's a fantastic transparent acrylic that's a sort of brown/black combination and it works absolute wonders on metal. So I slathered the metal pieces with a couple thin layers and awaited the results.

Unfortunately, my satisfaction with each section had flipped. The diamond plate looks great, but the perforated metal has lost all of its rusty glory. You can see it in the 3rd pic below.

I'm chalking it up to the diamond plate having texture for the wash to stick to, and the other pieces being completely flat. I'll re-stipple on the rust and silver as needed, and that should fix it.

A few disconnected updates today, since I'm getting really close to being done.

I re-rusted the perforated metal plates, which really helped with the color. Very happy with them now.

I also put a rusty wash on the tunnel entrances. They originally got the same smoke wash treatment as the rest of the metal, they just needed a little more accent to them. I wanted the rust effect to be lighter than the scrap metal pieces, as I imagine they get better upkeep than some detritus half buried in the dirt.

Finally, I put in a few grass tufts here and there, just to break up the waste a bit. I used pre-made tufts, and kept to dead/dying colors (except for one). I'm going to go back and trim them down a little so they're not all universally long and uniformly sized.

Basically, that's all the painting that needs to be done! I've got some plans for the sides, but at the moment the hard work is complete.

Amazing looking board so far!

The cork works wonders and I really like those tunnel endings.
Will come back for more. Interested to see how it turns out after you finish the edges.

Thanks!

Done and done!

I forgot I hadn't posted these pics yet, so here's the final build.

I painted the sides with a few layers of the Raw Umber color I'd been mixing into the ground color. This helped clean up the edges, but it made one side very bristly. I had sanded everything down, I thought, but I guess the moisture from the paint picked up all the little ends of the wood fibers. I should have gone back and re-sanded, but nah.

To protect the corners of the table (and the surface of any other table it sits on) I put felt around the corners. It turned out really well, and gives it a more finished look, if I do say so myself. I'll put up another post with details about how I made the corners.

Good thinking on the felt corners. The whole table looks great for both scales, so you did an excellent job.

Really nice work mate. A table I'd be proud to play on every time!

Attention to detail really paid off in the weathering work around the tunnels and the road way. Hope we get to see pics furnished with terrain and minis too!

One more post on this project before I move on to the Next Big Thing.

As shown above, I put felt corners on the edges of the board to protect it and anything else it sits on. Here's how.

I decided I wanted the felt to go 1 inch up on either side. Since the width of the wood on the bottom is 3/4 of an inch, I cut a 2 3/4" square of paper to test. I made a diagonal cut from opposite corners to the part that would be the bottom.

See photo comments for the rest.