Reconditioning roads...

Under moonlight here in the Castle, while the smaller denizens have slept fitfully, there hasn't much blogging, but there has been a fair amount of painting. Over a week has passed by since my last blog, I really do intend to blog more regularly, but I've also been swept up by the desire to get all my Splintered Light miniatures painted for Song of Blades and Heroes - the skirmish style miniatures game that has really caught my imagination of late.

In between painting mice and otters and various other anthropomorphic warriors, I've been trying to make some various pieces of terrain to pretty up the table top as a game is played. Last blog I wrote about some of the forest and wall pieces I made, this blog I'll look at reconditioning some old roads and rough terrain.

Back in the dim reaches of my gaming history I was a big fan of DBA, this is a small and compact historical miniatures wargame. For this I made various bits and pieces to go on the board, including some roads and a piece of rough terrain. Originally these were simply made and decorated, I used pieces of linoleum, and cut them into strips for the roads, and a roundish piece for a bit of rough terrain. I spray painted them a gloss dark green and scattered some dirt from a nearby garden bed on them for effect. At the time I was overjoyed with how they looked, and while they would certainly still have been perfectly functional now, they didn't exactly match the aesthetic I've been trying to hit with my miniatures and other bits and pieces.

In order to recondition both I spray painted them with a white undercoat (I could have used black, but wanted them to match in with the bases of the miniatures I've been painting, which are undercoated white). Using some old folk art paints I painted them in a dark brown, then successively drybrushed them with three other layers - the final being a light drybrush of a skin-tone. After sealing them, I added some pieces of twig painted up, some flock, and a few Army Painter tufts of grass. Voila!

I don't have any single shots of the originals, but you can see them in this in-play shot I posted a while ago from a game of Song of Blades and Heroes:

The road is running the length of the board, and the rough terrain is top left.

After the undercoat and paint:

Roads...

Rough terrain...

And here they are with a very little bit more detailing...

Road... (obviously)

Rough terrain (with complimentary mole)...

In addition to fixing up the roads and rough terrain I've also painted up some mice and otters... nearly finished the first set I bought from Splintered Light!