Wednesday 10 November 2010

Realm of Battle

I'm one of those guys who back in the day used to have a flat, green cloth battlefield with the occasional rock and model tree to break up the dullness. Having a decent, sculpted battlefield to fight over with hills and hollows built into it seemed like a far off fantasy, as DIY was never one of my strong points, and aside from the occasional bit of cut polystyrene covered in wall filler to make it a bit more durable, my scenery making days were fairly limited to small, portable pieces, and modular terrain was something well beyond my skill levels.

After I spotted the Citadel Realm of Battle I was smitten. I was shocked at the price too, but smitten all the same. Then the store came along, with its trade prices.

I just had to give one a go. It would make a nice centrepiece for the store, so armed with a nice big bag of reptile sand (after a bit of a failure at getting decent sand at B&Q and picking up a bag of wet, builders sand, and realising that it came out in big clumps and not loose) and a massive pot of PVA glue, I set to work on the boards covering them over with the basing mix to give it a nice texture to play on.

I keep on forgetting just how big 6 lots of 2 foot square clumps of hard polystyrene could be. The entire living room floor seemed to be covered with newspaper to try and keep the spillages to a minimum, but after some investing in some 'artists acrylic' (read great big pots for about the same price as I pay for my small miniature painting pots of paint) I set to work with the basecoating and drybrushing, on a set of nice half and inch wide brushes I picked up.

I picked a fairly standard 'green grass with patches of mud showing through to break up the monotony' look just to keep it roughly in line with my green bases since these were all going to generally go together as display pieces in the shop, and I kept my stone colouring the same as the smaller rock assemblies I have done as loose pieces of scenery.

As far as a review of the boards....

I like them. They're sturdy themselves, but of course the miniatures have serious problems sliding down the hills, but that was somewhat stopped by my liberal application of sand to give something that provides a bit more friction.

The obvious thing that pretty much everyone else has commented on are the 'tectonic skulls' - i.e. the fact the entire land seems to have been rested on a sea of skulls, since every single crack in the ground has a few skulls inside them, but its still a nice board even with that glaring issue.

The clips are pretty poor, but as long as you rest the boards on a baseboard of some type, it's got no problem sticking together even after some accidental knocks, and some non accidental 'moving all around the place to get past it' moments.

Theres a few work in progress shots of the board in my flickr account, and for those that don't like clicking links, heres a photo of the finished article - though its only 4 of the 6 boards as the others wouldn't fit where we had them on display.


Finally... a link to the aforementioned Flickr album... enjoy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/1man1brush/sets/72157625332444670/

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