Category Archives: Scenery/Terrain

Metallic Horticulture!

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Trees have been driving me crazy lately. The store-bought or Internet-order choices you have tend to follow these themes, pretty much:
  1. Arsey looking plastic trees that look like foamy green poofs impaled on brown sticks
  2. Expensive arsey looking plastic trees that look like foamy conical green poofs impaled on brown sticks
  3. Really expensive arsey looking plastic trees that look like squiggly shaped green poofs impaled on brown sticks
  4. Arsey looking DIY tree kits that are basically identical to #1-#3, except YOU put them together yourself, and the instructions give you the distinct impression that 6 hours from opening the package, you’ll end up curled under your desk in a fetal position looking like the illegitimate lovechild of Oscar the Grouch and a porcupine
  5. Oh, and all of the above are in the wrong scale
  6. Overpriced injection molded trees from Games Workshop that look like evil refugees from a Disney cartoon or the baby-eating tree in Poltergeist
  7. Really nice looking and frighteningly expensive trees that look like they will break or fall apart the second Greasy McCheetofingers looks at them funny
So, since all of the store-bought options are pretty much ruled out, that leaves doing them myself. There are several methods, but I chose the twisted-wire method because I have everything needed except the foliage. In that method, you twist soft wire (copper wire or florist’s wire) into something approximating a tree, you spackle or putty over the armature, and then you glue clumps of foliage onto it.
This is the second wire armature I’ve done:
It looks semi-reasonably tree-ish to me. It’s also fun and dirt cheap to do, so I’m going to do several more wire tree armatures for practice. Once I hit on a flow that I like, I’m gonna experiment with various non-messy methods of bulking out the armature and giving it a nice bark texture.

Painting The Lazy Way 2: Zuzzy Terra-Flex Mat

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Introduction

Several months ago, I purchased a 3×3-foot Ruined Lands terrain mat from Zuzzy Miniatures. I also posted an out-of-the-box review, but didn’t get around to actually painting the mat until yesterday. So, this post is a continuation of the review as well as an opportunity to add another painting article to Chez Ebbles.

Photos

First, a couple of photos. (Click ’em to see the full size versions.)



I only used four colors, and the mat’s surface detail does most of the work.

Paints Used

  • Vallejo Game Color Charred Brown
  • Vallejo Game Color Earth
  • Vallejo Game Color Black
  • Vallejo Game Color Cold Grey

Painting Overview

  1. The entire mat was painted with a 1:1 mix of Charred Brown and water, using a large flat paintbrush. I used a whole bottle of Charred Brown in a disposable cup.
  2. Next, the mat was drybrushed gently with a 1:1 mix of Earth and water.
  3. Another drybrushing pass, with a bit more pressure, on random areas of the mat.
  4. A final heavy drybrushing pass on random areas of the mat, with special attention paid to the rocks and areas of dried/cracked soil.
  5. The burnt tree limbs and areas of charred undergrowth were painted with thinned-down Black.
  6. The burnt tree limbs and areas of charred undergrowth were drybrushed with a 1:1 mix of Black and Cold Grey.

The most important thing to remember: thin your paint! The 1:1 paint-to-water mix goes a much longer way than unthinned paint, and because acrylic paint is transparent to varying degrees, colors blend better when really thinned out. So, that first layer of Charred Brown and water serves to tint the dark gray latex of the mat to a deep, rich soily-brown color, and the first drybrushing pass brings out the surface relief nicely. The subsequent drybrushing passes serve to give the surface a nice, uneven variation in soil color.

The mat took me about 7-8 hours to do, but it was a fairly easy and undemanding task. I used one entire bottle of Charred Brown, less than a third of a bottle of Earth, and about the same amount of Black and Cold Grey as if I were painting a couple of 28mm figures.

Conclusion

Unpainted, the Zuzzy mat looks nice enough. Painted, even by a lazy painter like me, a Zuzzy mat completely blows every other gaming landscape solution out of the water. I can’t go back to fighting battles on Planet Green Cloth now, so you could say that I’ve been absolutely spoiled by the Zuzzy mat. Painting one is an easy task, but requires a fair amount of time, so a large Zuzzy mat would be a fun group project, even for unskilled painters. Draft some family members or invite some gaming buddies over, give each of ’em a nice big tank brush, assign them an individual area of responsibility, and you’ll have a finished mat in no time flat.

Zuzzy Terra-Flex Mat Review

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Zuzzy sells roll-up latex gaming mats with sculpted surface relief:
I ordered a 36×36-inch version of the mat in the link above on the 11th. The confirmation email told me to expect a 1 to 3 week wait for shipping, so I figured it’d arrive sometime next week. To my surprise, it arrived today.
It comes rolled up around a stiff cardboard tube and a layer of foam padding, in a plastic sleeve. This, in turn, is shipped in a box. You’ll want to keep these items so you can store the thing rolled up.
I cleared off one of my work tables and lay the mat on it to see how it looked. It’s a very thin latex mat that lays totally flat, and is in a very dark gray color. The 3D detail on it is interesting-you can see rocks, dirt, fallen tree limbs, and other things like that all over the place. It looks so much better than a flocked paper or vinyl mat-the surface relief makes it look much more natural, so your figures don’t look like they’re fighting on a giant sheet of green sandpaper.
I was worried that the raised 3D detail might make it impossible to lay flat-bottomed terrain items on the mat, but the latex seems to have enough give that things can settle nicely on it. Even the cardstock landing pad I built the other day didn’t look obnoxiously out of level. I then took the unpainted Battle for Macragge lander wreckage pieces and laid them out on the mat for the sake of curiosity…I visualized the whole thing painted, and if the finished result even looks just half as awesome as what I saw in my head, then this mat is gonna be very cool to play on.
I was also half expecting it to be easily torn and a little flimsy, but it feels pretty strong. Now, I’m not suggesting that anybody stretch theirs out like some sort of exercise aid, but you can be assured that it’ll hold up to gaming pretty well.
The only issue I have with it doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual product itself-I’d feel a lot better if Zuzzy sent out tracking numbers or even just a courtesy “We shipped it today, expect it in 3-4 days” email, because OMG the local delivery drivers suck, and I’m always paranoid that my stuff is going to be misdelivered. (It happens a lot around here. In fact, UPS delivered my BSG Season 3 DVDs to our next door neighbor today.)
I’m really happy with the mat itself, and I’m looking forward to getting it all painted up. I’ll have to hit the Warstore’s webshop and order some extra Vallejo browns later tonight.