Terrain is everything - Project Ω - Realm of Battle Board - Varnishing Act!

It's funny how just a hint of sunshine is enough for me to gamble again by spray painting these boards. So despite the crisp weather and quite blowy conditions I just went and sprayed them [will I ever learn?].

And it actually worked! of course I don't know how tough and durable this is but it's got a coat of varnish on at least. I've still got the Winsor & Newton varnish to follow for added durabilty but at this stage I was really happy. I'd got through about two thirds of the can and criss-crossed all six boards and rotatated them to get decent coverage.

And I was still finding paint chips that go straight through to the board. Reaffirming my need to varnish but I'm beginning to doubt the adhesive properties of the base colours. I'm feeling like my paint on Red Oxide Primer may have been a better solution altogether, but I only know that now. Hindsight is always 20:20!

There's another one just visible on the right side about two thirds the way up. I've dabbed on some Red Oxide Primer and will go back and try and blend it in when it's dry.

Of course at this stage I just decided to finish off the can of varnish and typically the finish went a little bit, erm... weird.

Whether it was the excess, the wind or the bottom of the can but this coat 'fluffed up' a bit, which I'm sure is prompting a lot of you to want to give me a good kicking but thankfully a quick brush with a cloth managed to remove the fluff and dust. To get the powdery bits out of the nooks and crannys a large paint brush helped.

So we're still OK! All I need to do now is fix some of the paint chips and Winsor & Newton it, add a few bits of flock in the crevices for added interest and it's done!

Terrain is everything - Project Ω - Realm of Battle Board - Edge to edge

I know you'll say I don't need to apologise for lack of posting but I will, it's only polite afterall. So, sorry for not posting. I've been doing school Governor duties and just appointed a new headmaster. It's actually had little impact on my hobby but that's been just ticking along with stuff but not a great deal to share. However, I did decide it was about time I made some progress on Ferron Proxima. I hadn't really expected to paint the edges of the board butin the end couldn't NOT do it. I picked up some heavy duty red oxide primer. It's in a tin, not spray and even needs white spirits to clean your brushes. So now the edges are all tidy.

Compared to the edges which were stained with the shadow wash. It really is totally unnecessary but I couldn't help myself, even with 90% of the not inexpensive tin remaining. I even dropped one of the panels and got primer on one of my hoodies! Some white spirits may have removed most of it but it was still very tense.

So all the boards got coated and stacked in the garage. My only remaining things to do are perhaps a few more highlights on the skulls and the varnishing.

I have continued to debate what to do about varnish and I appreciate all the advice in the comments so far. I agree that the spray varnish may not be sufficient coverage, howver I think it may create a perfect base, to add to [he says after trying two separatevarnishes with no luck and thinks two unkonw entities may work].

To this end I'll try my plastikote spray on the remaining end of my test piece and then following nafnaf's advice managed to find a Winsor & Newton varnish that was siginificantly cheaper than other varieties for a 500ml bottle. It's also semi-transparent [or even transparent] looking, which unlike the milky Polyvine and creamy Wilko varnish gives me more confidence it will not go bad.

Hopefully the combined spray varnish for durability and paint on varnish for guaranteed coverage and extra durability will be the perfect answer. I'll get the tester going and then fingers crossed there'll be a good day for weather on the horizon to get this boxed off. So close, just need a sunny day.

That little matter of varnishing

My Realm of Battle board has been languishing in the garage for a couple of months now. Although I repaired the damage wrought by the Polyvine varnish I had not finished adding shading and painted the skulls. More alarmingly the garage is where we keep the tumble dryer so it's been regularly exposed to warm, moist, fabric dust! I've covered it up but I'm well aware I'm not doing any favours to its future prospects. So I need to tackly the varnish issue. To that end I prepared this 6" strip of MDF and painted it up.

As you can see it follows my standard Red Planet Basing and I can test out a suitable varnish instead of doing it on the boards and ruining it and having to start again. Although the grain is more pronounced than my boards I'm confident that if I can seal this neatly it'll be more than OK for the smoother RoB board.

Now PeteB, Liam and Ben think I'm overly paranoid about protection*, Liam and Ben haven't varnished their boards but this 'ultra tough' floor varnish seems to be ideal.

However, the milky/creamy consistency was worrying and there is a mention of it leaving a white finish on the tin which brings us back to Polyvine territory.

So I applied the varnish, foolishly to two thirds of the piece instead of half and I think you can see it's not acceptable. Granted this was still wet but the varnish managed to 'rehydrate' [not sure if that's the correct term] the top layer of the craft acrylic and mix with the varnish. This meant the varnish took on a slight orange tint and together with it's thickness has obscured much of the deepest shaded recesses.

I was going to be much happier with a brush on varnish but at this stage I'm contemplating a spray lacquer, of course I now only have a small amount of my test strip to try it out on. The question is which brand do I go for. There are some cheap clear varnish sprays available and I know 'cheap' should have alarm bells ringing but I recently saw some forum posts saying they were very good. I've actually even got some from a purchase at a £1 shop a while back.

I wont' be touching Purity Seal but there is Plastikote and there is even a supply of Rustoleum, which usually is only available in America.

I'll hopefully pick up a Plastikote, test it and my £1 shop version if the results don't stand up I'll have to accept this isn't going to be sealed. Meanwhile I might make another test piece just in case!

 

* Update, this is the reason I believe I need to varnish the boards:

These are just two of the five or six paint chips I discoverd on my Realm of Battle board which hasn't even been used for gaming! It's been sat in the garage, covered in bubble wrap for a weeks

I may have caught them bringing them into the house but that questions the durability of the paint a great deal. Anyway, I've got a Matt Plastikote Varnish Spray so I'll give it a go, on the test piece first.

Terrain is everything - Project Ω - Realm of Battle Board - We can rebuild it!

What we have here is the first 'real' step to the restoration of Ferron Proxima. The shadow wash solved the Polyvine problem but here we see the true colours shining through. The bottom board has had it's coat of Vermillion craft acrylic. I was slightly more judicious with its application this time as the shadow wash was heavier to counter the Polyvine so I was having to cover black shadows instead of darkened Red Oxide, if you follow.

Now it took a suspiciously long time to do the first panel which may indicate I added too much and subsequently was less enthusiastic with it's application on the remaining tiles. 

I don't know whether the strength of the application will show up, certainly in these pictures it's not immediately evident but there are filters applied to the images which may not represent 100% colour accuracy [close though].

The second flat board seems to be of a similar tone and we are still saving some of the past effort.

Although it may look a fraction darker in this comparison...? However I think I fixed the boards in respect to taking the highlight to the edge a little more. I was concerned the tiles would look distinct, I think I've mitigated that compared to the first time around.

here you can see the right side of the board highlighted. Some may think I'm flattening out a perfectly acceptable finish but you can just see some Polyvine remnants in the top left corner so close up this far from the perfect finish so I have to fix it. There are still highlights to add to this which will bring back the contrast we gushed about first time around.

Bang! and the Polyvine is gone! All back to an acceptable first pass of highlights.

On with the Pumpkin, mixed in with Vermillion. Once again it was only a small amount of Pumpkin and I made sure not to highlight any tile edges, only board texture, and random spots across the board for variety.

This was followed by a pure Pumpkin highlight on the extreme edges and adreas of 'high traffic'

Overall I think I managed to recapture the original.

But the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating [although the lighting is a little off between the two pics they are pretty much bob on] ...

Close up I may have added a little more Pumpkin despite the above picture suggesting otherwise.

And on with the spatter. i managed to get some bigger blobs in some places, which was nice

However, there is definitely a diagonal 'swathe' in the bottom left hand corner resulting in the spots having a direction. Not optimal but I can live with it after all the drama thus far.

I did however object to the three larger blobs of Bonewhite, an example being the one on top of the hill. And so went at it with a damp cloth. Of course it didn't come off cleanly and despite a similar 'rescue attempt' on paint bristle last time around I didn't learn from my mistake and the end result probably looks worse than if I'd just left those three larger blobs. Clearly I need to have a lesson beaten into me to take notice!

So, next up the extra shading and then fix the skulls...

Terrain is everything - Project Ω - Realm of Battle Board - 50 Shades of Red Oxide

Happy Hallowe'en! Dry your eyes and lets fix this mother! On with the shadow wash. You can see there is still some evidence of the Polyvine [the whiteish streaks towards the top of the board] but overall I'd say it's been reduced by 80%

Once again this could be considered a perfect place to stop and I bet this would ideal for most of what John Blanche does with his Inquisition models or those done by Spiky Rat Pack [which I think are done for JB]

The colours are very earthy indeed and more than suitable for that painterly look that's popular for INQ28.

I'm hoping that because I've still manage to retain some of the depth of colours from the original coat of paint there will in fact be much more to see in the details when I add the highlights.

It's such a relief that I don't have to go back to square one, square 2.5 is still rewarding for the effort put in so far.

Just to illustrate how bad the Polyvine can get, notice the white 'foamed blob' on the edge just where the clips go. Clearly this product is desparate to dry milky white. Goodness knows what I would do if it dried like that on a freshly laid hardwood floor - it's intended purpose!

Terrain is everything - Project Ω - Realm of Battle Board - The following post has scenes of a graphic nature

 So here's what Polyvine does to Realm of Battle Boards. You can actually see in some areas it's OK

But in others it's just frosted/dusted and there's no explanation of why some areas dried 'dead flat' and some areas just flat wrong!

This tile isn't so bad but I think that may be the photography. The funny thing is I was up in the loft building drawer units and looking out on it drying from up high and little did I realise those brush marks weren't going to fade away.

The flat tiles are nearly the same, again in places they're not too bad,

but when you get cloe up you can see it looks like it's been covered in dust.

I even tried adding a second coat, hoping the application would fix the initial opacity. I added a bit of water and it went on so well but could not do anything for where the Polyvine had already gone milky.

Eventually I just put them in the garage and time was no healer.

    

So the 40kaddict does not recommend this product for any hobby surfaces!