Terrain Table Woes

I've failed to paint anything this weekend so I will take a moment tell you my readers of a tale terrain misfortunes. You may have notice my new title picture for the blog that is a picture of my 4'x4' Mountain Valley Table. (pictured above) I have always wanted to make a 4'x4' table to play LOTR on so when a local store was hosting a convention I deiced this was the moment for me to build my table. I had cut the 4 2'x2' tiles long ago to make a Plains of Rohan table, but at the last minute I felt that just wasn't exciting enough so I opted for a Mountain Valley on the edge of the Misty Mountains. Now so far this all sounds great but this was a spur of the moment thing I had 6 weeks to  complete the table from start to finish. I was literally adding the final layers of flock the night before.

So what's the problem you might ask it looks beautiful and it really does in person, I used several different shades of green flock to give it a natural appearance. In my mad rush to build it at night after work I failed to continually check the fitting of the tiles edges the North/South edges I seemed to have check regularly but when I fitted everything together the night before transporting it I discovered that the East/West edges don't fit together!

This I suspect was partly do to the fact that I am an apartment dweller without a table large enough to fit all of it together all at once. From the pictures below you can see how this project took over the tiny living room of my 1 bedroom apartment.

Well this more of a ramble than an article but since this is a blog of my LOTR endeavors I guess that's ok.

BattleBoards UK

Here is a advertising video for BattleBoards. BattleBoards is one of the very few professional gaming terrain board makers in the world. They have made numerous gaming/display boards for manufactures and clubs to be exhibited at Salute in London. They have recently begun posting videos of their work on youtube.  The link to BattleBoards is here. 

Here is the first video of his Mordor project, he doesn't have any of the others up unfortunately. You can see that he has been classically trained as a sculptor and uses materials I haven't seen used since I worked in movies a long time ago. Please note that fiberglass is very dangerous to one's health so don't muck about with it unless you know what you're doing. I'm not please with the "little Major" character but I'm happy to say he abandons him in later videos.

Though I'm not a fan of any of the fantasy football games out there this next video illustrates proper mold making techniques. very nicely.

Sorry trying to post too quickly. This video illustrates brushing on the first layer of silicone to make sure you get the details and reduce air bubbles. The blue stuff is silicone. Next he layers plaster on top of the dried silicone mold to form a base for it to rest on when he pours the resin in. Notice he also brushes on the first resin layer.