Canvas, Caulk, paint, Flock

Allright… so while the battle for Peter’s Hill is still ongoing (will explain later), I want to take the opportunity to talk a bit about the bits and pieces of terrain that I had to provide for this scenario.

Beside the hill itself, perhaps the most prominent terrain feature of this particular board is a large wooden area that covers the entirety northern half of that hill. There are different ways to represent wooden areas, but in this particular case I decided to try the technique I’ve already shown in one of previous posts – caulk mixed with paint, spread on canvas and then covered with flock.

I used exactly the same technique that I’ve tested here. The difference between the test piece I did on that occasion this time around was the size. I started by cutting off suitable piece of painting canvas and pinning it to the table. Next I outlined the shape of the wooden area. This helped me to keep track of the shape of the terrain piece as I spread thin layer of caulk and paint mix on the canvas. Finally the ‘painted’ canvas was covered with liberal amount of ‘Nadelwald boden’ ground cover mix from Buch. Once this was done, I left everything to dry for two days.

After two days I unpinned the mat and cut out the covered piece. Despite it being pinned to a table, the edges of the mat curled upward during the drying process. This was expected, but caused a bit of concern.

On a whim I decided to try to fix this problem by simply painting the edges of the mat with same acrylic paint I used of ‘original’ mixture. This turned out to fix the curling problem and at the same time resolved the issue with the rather unseemly white edges, which would otherwise disturb the visual effect on the gaming table.

Another thing that I wondered about was how well the ground scatter material would actually stick to the caulk/paint layer. In the much smaller test piece I did earlier, the adhesion as well as flexibility of the finished piece was really very good, but this piece was much larger. I didn’t have to worry though, size of the mat didn’t make any difference at all and the flock sticks to the caulk as if it were glued there.

Since this piece of terrain is really rather large (about 60 x 60 cm), the question of how to store it became a bit of an issue. Obvious solution here is rolling the piece together. I was however a bit worried about friction agains flocked side. To give it a bit of protection I simply picked out four pieces of baking paper, taped them together with duct tape and used them as top cover for the mat.

Overall, I am quite happy with both the mat itself as well as with how useful this techinque is turning out to be. I am quite sure that I will be using it in the future for different types of area terrain that need to be flexible. Roads, rivers and other linear obstacles is another area where this technique could turn out to be quite useful after a bit of experimenting.