Blue's Modular Table Part VI

Once more into the Breach my Friends!!!

Painting of the tiles continues!  Lets take a look at the next steps.

Following along with the system outlined in the last post I have continued to work into progressively lighter browns for the roads, rocks and rubble on the modular tiles.  The third color to be applied is the VMC Khaki Grey.  For the application of this color I transitioned into actual Dry brushing.  I used a small cardboard box lid as my pallet...I get a little bit of paint on the bristles of a soft 2-inch bush and then work most of it off with several passes on the cardboard.  Then I apply the color to the terrain board with very soft strokes...allowing the color to adhere to raised portions of the texture on the tile while leaving the darker colors in the "recesses" of the texture.

Here is what a couple of the boards looked like after this step.  Once again note that the area of earth color continues to expand onto/into the large green swaths...further breaking up the putting green feel of portions of the tiles.

This same process was employed for the final tan color as well...though I used an even drier brush for the dry brushing...and again...expanded the areas of color yet further.  Here are some of the same tiles shown above with the final tan color (VMC Buff) applied

YES!!!  Its finally starting to feel like the semi-arid/high plains kind of feel that I shoot for with my basing technique.

At this point I had some significant decisions to make.  On the Quindia Studios blog...at this point Clarence went back in and painted all the rocks and rubble a dark grey and started the highlighting process on them all over again.  I was conflicted about doing this.  Coloring the rocks and rubble the same shades as the rest of the "earth" made sense to me...and looked good...maybe I could skip that step...?  In an effort to determine which way to go on this choice I took the opportunity set up the castle hill tiles and put my boarder fortress on to see how it worked together

It looks quite good!


....But the more I looked at it the more it it bothered me that the castle would be a grey color but the surrounding rocks and rubble would be tan...It seemed to make more sense to me to have the rocks and rubble match with the color of the castle more closely....


...so decision made!  I will repaint the rocks and rubble.  This will also help to break up the earth colored areas (which had gotten quite large) and provide an interesting contrast with the other colors.


For the rocks and Rubble I decided to employ some colors from my stash of Craft paints.

I started with the Zinc Color mixed with a little black to form a very dark grey and applied it to all the rock and rubble patches and cliff faces on the tiles.

 

Feeling a bit nervous that I had made the wrong decisions about the color change I went ahead and highlighted up one patch of rubble on the S-Curve tile to get a better idea of what my final product would look like...

Ok...that looks a lot better...so I followed through with the highlighting of the rocks and rubble throughout all the tiles.

At this point I felt that the contrast between the tan and grey was still a bit severe...to rectify this situation I added one more highlight that was a mix of the lightest grey and bit of the Buff paint that I had used as the final brown highlight.  This further lightened the rocks and rubble and slightly reduced the contrast between terrain types.  I also used a very light layer of buff stippled onto the areas around the rocks and rubble to ease the transition between the two colors.

Here is the same board with these final additions made...

Excellent!  At this point I'm feeling done with the painting portion of this project.

Here is a pic with two of the panels together...giving a better idea of what the whole thing will look like when complete

That seems like a good place to stop for now.

In the next installment we will look to add some additional color and texture to the boards by adding some static grass and tufts etc. to selected places.

Cheers for now!

Blue