"Movement trays, do you texture yours?" Topic

Movement trays are one of my pet peeves in wargaming. It bugs me when there's a really nice-looking board terrain and miniature wise, only to see giant white squares or bare cardboard underneath the units fighting the battle.

As casualties are taken out of course more of the white shows beneath. Or bare cardboard or foamcore. To me it's one of the biggest visual distractions there is, and also happens to be one of the easiest things to fix!!

I texture mine by simply spraying them in either brown or green and then I brush PVA glue over them and then sprinkle static grass on them:

link
link
link

I also invested in quite a number of Games Workshop's old school movement trays from the 90s and early 2000s. The plastic came in green in those days and you don't even need to spray them. I picked up a bunch of them on the secondary market and also bought several sets of their 7th/8th Edition time period movement tray kits. I know that a lot of people make their own movement trays out of their own materials. However I found that by the time I bought all the materials and the time it would take to actually make them, it wasn't that much more expensive to just buy them.

The GW tray kit was $17.00 USD which might seem outrageous, but you get enough plastic in them to make about 10 trays for a block of 20mm x 20mm or about 6 trays for 25mm x 25mm. I bought up four sets of these back in 2012. One of the really neat things about GW's kit is that they scored both sides of the sheets with 25mm and 20mm squares so there's no guessing about size, you just count out the number of squares you need.

These are all hard, gray plastic just like their minis. so there's no warping worries, perfectly flat.

And they accounted for gluing on the edge pieces and purposely left a little extra room, they are just SLIGHTLY bigger than the footprint of the unit.

That way if you have a few minis. in the unit that don't rank up perfectly or are practically touching when in line, you can space them out just a bit so they all fit. Makes ranking up a lot easier and takes a lot of the hassle of every mini. having to rank up perfectly:

link
link
link

Sure. I like that.

The plastic came in green in those days and you don't even need to spray them.

Mine were an eye-searing green that blended with nothing. Why they chose that tone, I'll never know.

I have round-based minis I have on Litko sabot bases. Obviously, there is more than just a thin rim around the perimeter like with rank trays. I sand flock the 'middle spaces', give them two thick coats of mid-brown craft paint, wash and drybrush. Seal, add static grass and tufts.

I have done up a few, not as nice as yours, but that is my goal for all the great reasons you state

So far the ones I use are painted either green for Europe or tan for Colonials. No texturing yet although that is on the long "to do" list.

Yours are nicely done.

Jim

link
link

a couple of my bases,
I try to blend the edges with how the minis are flocked
:)
I'm going to start with Litko sabot bases with sabots of terrain to fill in for missing figs next…
(like Beast)

the time I spend on bases takes away from painting figs or gaming so I am a bare bones on bases guy

I use Warbase movement trays which I found just too "flat".
I gave the top of the bases a thin layer of polyfilla spackling (careful not to get it into the slots where the figure bases go) to rough it up a bit and then flocking them.

Yes, movement trays for large games are a must, and they should be tied in with the same basing as the army.

I gave some to a mate whose dump stat is Initiative. He used them upside down.So I seized them overnight and wrote "This way up" in paint on them.

I use the GW movement trays also. I wish they still made them. I do not bother to paint the green colored ones. They look ok on the cloth covering I use. But yours look really good.

GW's LotR movement trays were badly designed -- the edges were smooth and slightly angled inward on top, denying you anything to grip to even pick up the base.

I sprayed them Khaki. I bought 1" wooden nickels from Hobby Lobby. I drilled through these, made lift-out "handles" from paper clips, and used them as plugs. Put the nickels in the base, spray the entire thing with textured paint, flock with static grass, and lift out the plugs.

They looked good, didn't take much time to paint, and most importantly the textured edges gave me something to grip to lift the bases off the table.

My troop stands are nicely textured. My movement stands are simple sheet magnet spray painted olive green, or whatever will blend. If it is for a rule set e play often I cut them custom, so very little of the stand usually shows:

I do. I love the old GW bases

Xin

I do same as you. I started with the original GW trays and learned to cut them up and glue back together to make custom trays, and to use styrene to add to these trays or to make my own from scratch. But when the GW movement tray kit came out, man that was awesome.

As I am moving to everything magnetic, I just tend to use metal sheets that are cut so that they really don't overlap the base. Painting them is something that I have not got to yet, but always a good idea, and easy with just some spray paint.

Made 'em for the first time. Easier than painting, that's for sure! These were done on cardboard, so I figure I'll get some balsa wood or something later. They're for Kings of War, so it doesn't matter how many miniatures you have on a base. So, instead of 20 figures on a base, I can have nine on one, nine on the other. Now *that* is how you cut down on your painting time! (: