streetline – rolf, lmao
yeah, I actually considered that for a while, but the thing is once you use a q tip, the wax would prevent the paint from soaking up the colors. if you really wanted an orange and yellow forest, youd need a lot of people's ear wax to really color the field. lol, yeah, gross.
warrenB -
1. select an area youd like to game on, obtain good quality topo map at the smallest scale possible
2. pick your scale. one inch to fifty meters wont cover much of an area. I settle for one inch to a hundred meters. the vertical scale should match the linear scale, in order to facilitate line of sight rules. one contour of cardboard represented about twenty meters.
3. transfer topo map to the sheets of cardboard. select the best quality cardboard you can. pick nice flat sheets, not too thick. draw each contour line on the cardboard and cut each layer out with a sharp razor. it takes practice. to get the curves right will take a few attempts. an X-acto knife would have been preferable
4. glue together. I used ordinary white glue which worked very well, and went a long way to sealing up the edges of the corrugation, which are unsightly and unreal. glue from the bottom level, working your way up to the tops of the mountains. starting at the top is asking for serious warping. clamp the sheets together when glued, weighing it down with lead or heavy books.
5. paint with cheap acrylic paints or cheap Tempra brand powdered paint mix which worked beautifully. it gave a nice rich velvety finish which was flat and bright.
6. seal the edges. if youre a perfectionist, you will want to seal up all the edges with green paint mixed with putty. a caulking gun would have worked well but I didnt have the money for all that. if you caulk, obviously do it before painting. if youre not a perfectionist, dont worry about this step.
7. cover the finished painted board with terrain such as forests, boulders, roads, and buildings. I made building out of clay (smaller than a half inch) and the boulders were simple gravel which I sifted for the right size. the roads were cut from thin cardstock and painted black before gluing to the board. the river was a real bitch kitty, as I had to paint swirling blues, browns, and greens on the underside of long sheets of plastic sheeting, the tarp quality stuff sold at painters shops. then I had to line both banks of the river with cardstock painted gree.
8. I made trees by buying five boxes of q-tips (before I used them) and I cut the tips off around a third of an inch long. five boxes of q tips equals three thousand trees, which was just enough to cover this board at a rate of three per square inch the tips were not all the same size. there should be variation. at this point, you should really really spend a couple days fluffing up the cotton puffs, so they are all different sizes. I didnt do this step and all the trees are the same shape (dumb) Then I mixed up six different shades of green paint with warm water and soaked the q tips in the paints. so after drying, I had about four hundred trees of each color. it takes a long time to dry, and they could have gotten moldy in that time if I didnt have a dehumidifier on, for my own health purposes. once dry, I mixed equal parts of brown paint and white glue, to a thich brown paste, and dipped EACH FRICKIN TREE in the brown paint, to cover the tree trunk up to the foliage, and then planted each tree in a tiny hole I made in the cardboard with a small screwdriver, just the right size.
you should wipe the excess glue/paint off the tree trunks before 'planting' each tree or else the excess will run down slowly and leave small brown rings at the base of each tree, which you would have to go back and touch-up later
I used a satellite image of this park to find out where the forests of coniferous forest really are, and used trees color with a mix of green and BLACK to represnt these forests, where movement and sighting rules change.
if youve got major plans for tank battles, you have to leave room for tanks to maneuver around the trees where tanks will be allowed to go. I found that three trees per square inch of forest allows an M1 tank to maneuver but still gives a deep forest feeling to the area
9. a tornado once touched down at this park, so I made hundreds of tiny dead trees out of simmple twigs from the trees around here, cedar tree twigs worked well. broken into third of inch lengths and glued together to form impassable 'dead-falls'
if youre going hollow, you want to start from step three and cut out the unwanted portion before gluing, obviously. I would leave at least an inch wide border to glue together. if you expect a lot of bouncing around in a car, I would leave more like two inches border for each level.
I hope I covered most of the important stages of making this thing. it was two months well spent, I think. then again I am pretty boring
I feel it invaluable to be able to make a good map of whatever area I want, not some wargame designer who doesnt think tanks should be properly challenged.
any questions, dont hesitate to ask