Welcome to the Jungle

Finally got back in the garage today.  Started adding flora to the jungle mounds from the previous post.  Alot more time consuming than I anticipated, about 45 minutes to an hour for each mound.  I made a total of 12 mounds and only had time to finish up 5 today.  I did a few other things while out there messing around.  Cut my terrain table boards down to fit on the main playing surface.  Was going to texture and paint the terrain boards but I feel like I should add some slats to the underside of the quarter inch MDF to keep from bowing before I get busy with the playing area.  I think I will go pick up some 1x2 pine slats to make a frame support underneath.

I mainly used aquarium plants with some ferns I picked up from Micheal's craft store.  Without further ado here are the shots of the jungle pieces I got completed.

The palm like tree in the center was made from the stem from the fern with aquarium plant leaves hot glued to the wire nubs.  I gave it a drybrush of light green and light brown to give it a trunk like appearance.  I still wanted it to be a plant, so left it green.

Here's a pterodactyl's eye view of the 5 finished pieces and unpainted Garar Stormraven hanging out in the jungle.  These 5 include the largest pieces that I made.  The rest are alot smaller than the two largest pieces shown here and are more the size of the bottom left corner piece.

Busy Busy Busy

The jungle terrain is coming along rather slowly.  The drying steps just kill me.  I applied a light drybrush to the mounds, I don't know if it was noticeable.  My garage lighting is not optimal for painting and I didn't feel like bringing everything in the house, the cats don't make that very easy anyway.  Here is the dry brushing.

I know you can barely tell, they did dry really glossy and the drybrushing toned that down a bit.  I didn't think the drybrushing needed much time to dry so I painted some glue onto the figs and sprinkled some flock on just to give the bases some added variety before I apply the jungle foliage.

 The glue hasn't dried beneath the flock which lends the sheen to the underside of the flock.  I'm hoping to get them done tomorrow after work.  I was doing a few other projects while I was in the garage.  I finally finished up my evergreen trees.  Here is what they look like.  I won't go into too much detail on the how to, I was going to put up a tutorial at some point on both the tree types I created.

The small deep green trees nestled in the group are dollar store trees I picked up to help fill up the table.

The Flocking Test part 2

Well I got my test strip done, unfortunately I didn't use the same colors but here is the result encase you just can't be bothered to color your flock, and I don't blame you its a long process with all the waiting for dry time.  Anyway here is the test strips after painting the uncolored sawdust.

I personally prefer the pre coloring the flock before adhering it to terrain.  But I could see the benefit in doing it the other way.

Jungle Terrain

This is my second post tonight.  Feast or Famine here at my blog!!!  Recently we started up our monthly "Nerdnite" which is what got me fired up to start blogging again.  That and having an iPhone helps.  I've been dawdling on terrain off and on for the past couple of years, going in bursts but really not completing anything.  This winter I've been putting the most effort into it.  I started by making flock which I have no pictures of the process, but have plans of making some more in the future, so look forward to that post.

We kicked off our nerdnite with one of the long time players taking the reins of Gamemaster and deciding to run A Serpent's Skull AP from Paizo publishing for the Pathfinder RPG.  As I said earlier I had been dawdling on various terrain projects....ABSOLUTELY none of them jungle terrain!!!!

Unto the internet to find the path forged by those that have gone before.  And I must say very few have braved the Jungle Terrain before.  So into the heart of the jungle I venture.

So I decided to make a few foliage mounds.  To create "corridors" that could be arranged on the board in various ways.

Out came the pink board and this is the first step.  Layout and cutting up the pieces.

I sawed these pieces up with a serrated steak knife to give them a more natural shape.

I figured I would make 4 corner pieces, a few long pieces and some round pieces as generic terrain.  I feel like this is enough pieces to make an interesting battle in an RPG skirmish setting.  I may make a few more large scale terrain pieces for use with other games we play in our group.  But right now I need to focus on functioning pieces for the upcoming session.  All I had left to do today was paint up these pieces and this is where I left off for the day.

And I know quite well what they look like at this stage....  Hopefully I can er...um... Polish these turds.

Flocking Terrain

I have been making my own flock from some sawdust I picked up.  Its a horribly time consuming process and I am preparing to make a gaming table and was going to test to see if I could cover it with uncolored sawdust and apply paint to the glued down sawdust.

But before I get crazy I decided to test the theory on a small piece.  This is the first go at it and waiting for the glue to dry before I apply paint.

I also included a sample of my homemade flock which is the bottom piece.  I will continue to update.  I have several projects going so I will be posting a few more posts.