For the love of Terrain!: Winter table

Applying the Detailing

Once all the paint had dried, which took a lot longer than planned, I started to apply some additional detailing. The table was being worked on in a cold shed in the middle of winter! I ended up getting a couple of small electric heaters and a fan to blow warm air across the table to dry it out.

I wanted to replicate the standing water in the muddy track from my inspiration photos, but during the painting phase I decided that I also wanted to add some ice and a little bit of snow to make it look truly wintry. To simulate that, I bought some wet-look varnish from B&Q (no, I'm not sponsored by them, they have a store just down the road from where I live and nothing that I pick up there really costs very much) and painted it onto the areas where I was going to leave visible water e.g. in the ditches and depressions in the ground, in the tyre tracks and some random puddles.

When first painted on, it goes down white, which is helpful to see where you have applied it to, but it dries with a glossy finish. The marshy area got lots of the wood varnish.

The poor lighting in the photos actually show up where the varnish was applied.

You can see the variations in the colours starting to create the effect that I was going for now. Keep reading to the end of this blog to see some better photos of the finished gaming table. ;-)

Again, after a significant amount of drying time in the freezing shed, I started to apply some more detailing. Using weathering powders, I changed the colour of the earth in some the areas that I was intending to show through the grass flock. On reflection, I should have done this before applying the wet-look varnish because it obscured the wet earth effect too much.

So, back to the varnish to re-apply the areas where I wanted to model water/ice.

Whilst all this might seem that it took a lot of time, the only real time to get to this point was due to having to wait for the various things to dry properly. If I recall correctly, I think to get to this point only took about several hours of actual work. Lots of standing around drinking tea looking at and reminding myself to start the next project in the spring!

One of the things that I did do whilst waiting for paint and varnish to dry was to make some conifers. These are made from a type of wire brush that you lay into guttering to stop moss and leaves building up. I'll write up another blog about how I created those.

I forgot to take as many photos during the next stage, which was to apply flock and scatter material. I used three different colours of flock, and a couple of packets of scatter material, from Javis and randomly sprinkled these from height over different parts of the table. The idea, again, was to ensure that nothing looked too uniform, so a bit of dark green sprinkled into a larger patch of light green just breaks up the evenness and texture.

After using a dry paint brush to remove any flock from areas that I wanted to leave the wet earth exposed (bottom of craters, tyre tracks, ditches etc), I used some watered down PVA glue in a spray bottle to affix the flock to where it had settled then left it to dry.

Another little job that I accomplished whilst waiting for things to dry was to make some hedges. This was really simple: I bought a sheet of rubberised horse hair, cut it up into hedge shapes with a pair of scissors and then applied some extra colour (mostly green) using spray paints. Because my terrain table is winter-themed, the basic brown colour of the horse hair didn't need much doing to it to ensure that it looked like a wintry hedge to break up line-of-sight. I'll perhaps write a short blog post describing the hedge building in more detail too.