Hobby WIP: Display Boards

In preparation for the Northwoods GT in January of this year, I ordered some display boards in semi-bulk from Michaels. They did not get here in time, but over the summer I ordered a second batch to bring me up to 8 boards, which is enough for all my armies with plenty to spare for future projects.

Unfortunately, the intervening ~6 months looks to have hit the product with some good old capitalist shrinkflation. Despite going back to the same link and product, the depth of the frames for the second boards was about half that of the older boards. Fortunately, while I have a handful of armies, I am not fancy, and can easily get by with a shallow, very basic board for most of them. Over the summer, I got prepping, with the intent of trying to knock these out over the winter months for many of my armies. The easiest ones are all at least in-process now!

I have used a lot of cork previously in all my hobbying, and have a lot of edge scraps in a little container, and tried to put those to use in these builds. I wanted to try and match the army look as much as possible, so I did use a ~$8 tub of basing paste on these boards, which is more expensive than these probably need to be, but seems to be working out well enough so far. All of these were done a combination of paste and cork, applied and utilized to varying degrees, as these are my first display boards ever, and I wanted to explore some fundamentals.

The Varangur wastes.

The Varangur one is the first board done. This was the big test board for me, since I figured I could hide any imperfections behind the snow effect, and it turned out rather nice!

For process, I chunked up a cork board and spread it around. I then pasted lightly all over, not too worried about the coverage. I primed the edges and then took an unenthusiastic pass over the board itself in black using leftover, failing rattle cans as well. It was then painted the board black as a more uniform base coat, then a dark gray as a bit of an overbrush, then a light grey as a dry brush, all using basic craft paints. The paste coverage was spotty, but that was fine as wanted to hit the whole thing with a snow effect, as-mentioned.

The snow effect took four separate batches to mix up and apply. Thankfully, I realized this early, and spread it around in sections, rather than doing a harder one-side-to-the-other kind of application, to hopefully disguise any color differences from the different batches. I hit the board with a clear protective spray covering, and hopefully this is all set and sturdy. 

The other three boards in-process.

The other boards should all get roughly similar treatment, with similar materials. 

Abyssals on the right are getting some double-stacked cork and space for lava pools, but will be painted up much the same as the Varangur. The rocky ground is all done, I just need to pick up some yellow craft paints to finish off the lava. To my great shame, I only learned about sulfuric lava over the last year, so we've got normal-looking lava here. To anyone starting an Abyssals army, oh man, take that idea and do some color-swapping, it would look awesome.

Undead in the foreground got a deeper board, and are getting just haphazard paste coverage since we’ve got the muddy basing scheme. The rocks are done, and all the brighter gray patches will be covered with an assortment of browns. They are going to get a glossy finish for their protective cover, and then we’ll try the fog effect along the interior edge at least. Lots to do there.

Kingdoms of Men board got a little experimental. Using basing paste all over it didn't seem like a good idea. The paste is a little expensive, and it's probably take a whole new tub of it; thick coverage with the paste is a little stretchy and might peel; thin coverage with the past would look too bland and too uniform. So I tried a variety of pastes, and also a variety of glues with normal sand. So far, I don't like the look of this. I'll blame the glue for now. I did not dilute it, and even spreading it around, it just contracted more into blobs than I'd like. I think diluting the glue should get me the more rolling dunes that I was hoping for. Even more yet to come on this one, and I'll need to figure out what to paint the edge as well.

We'll eventually try to get some little name plaques or something 3d printed or something, but I want to have 4th released before I worry about any of that, since so many of my armies are theme lists. But yeah, a big step here in a wargaming career with some display boards, even if they are rather rudimentary.