Gaming Boards – Part 2
When left off, 4 Boards (3 river sections and a lake) were painted and grassed ready for Resin pouring.
First off, knowing that the pouring was a one time thing, if you screw it up, the board is screwed up, and that I wanted some surface texture, I made up a little test box:
After pouring in the clear resin and it drying, I took some cheap epoxy resin and put a thin layer on the top. I then went over it with an old paint brush to give a ripple effect. There were a couple of mistakes which don’t matter with this.. a bit of hair (I have long hair) got caught in the resin, and when the original pour was done, the box wasn’t as straight as I thought it was, so it’s at a bit of an angle, but nice generic (non-directional really) ripples on the surface. So, after this when well I thought I was ready for the first board.
I put some wood covered in brown parcel tape to block the sections where the river went off the board, and then used some large clamps to hold them in place, and then used some hot glue to seal it as best I could so that the would hold flat and not leak. still had minor leak, no real problem though.
For reasons of space and tidiness, I decided to pour it out side where a bit of leaking wouldn’t make too much difference.
This is called ‘The Big Mistakes’.
It turned out, the day in May was a bit warmer then I thought it was. Thus the resin set much too quickly and did what is called ‘burning’. It went yellowy, it formed cracks and started to shrink a bit which caused some damage to the edges of the river bank.
So, this board was screwed.. however, I think I might be able to kinda save it by just making it into a slightly dirty river section, so some patching on the river bank and some weeds/plants to cover up bits.. however, trying to get that right hasn’t been done yet and every thing I’ve looked at to try hasn’t worked so.. nothing yet. Oh, and there are also some small bubbles where it hasn’t fully degassed cause it dried too quickly. Like I said, can probebly do a patch job but so far nothing. I kinda want to do more river section tiles in the future so I have more of a range (and even some non-river tiles so I can have a 3×3 tile setup without rivers if I want) but sometime. not now.
I also had a bit of a delay due to leaky resin but the company was very good about it all, and then I worked on board 2:
I did this one indoors, It cured right and then I put on the surface texturing which.. I think I mixed up the cheap epoxy a bit wrong so it worked well, but warm hand and some fun smoke. Tile boards will probably need a bit of sanding later before painting them black as tiles NEVER line up seamlessly but it’s fine.
next one… while it looked okay there is a slight effect where I might not have mixed the resin right and the table wasn’t quite as flat as I hoped.
Oh well, and this is before I put the surface texture on. So I put the surface texture on and using some mis-cast resin pieces, I made it up into this:
Then the lake which.. wow, pretty heavy.. it’s deeper then the rivers and that resin is really heavy like this:
Personally, I think they don’t look quite as good in the photos but oh well ^_^
It was then time to move onto the two easiest boards to make. plain grassland. I decided to make it a bit more interesting with some bare path areas. The first one turned out like this;
Then the next one was just plain grass, so like the above one, it has slightly non-flat land (don’t want it perfectly flat.. won’t look natural at all) and I did screw up a tiny bit in the above cause I didn’t have a static grass applier yet. So that last board wasn’t photo’d yet cause .. it was a block of grass. nothing interesting. So without counting the burnt board, That is 5 boards done, Leaving 4 left. really I still need to figure out and patch up the burnt board but the next three? The Mountains. Like I said before, I did have a mis-start with them but started again when I finally got around it to starting them again.