Saturday, August 6, 2022

Going a Little Over-board!

 These past few weeks, I've been going through a bit of a painters block. No desires to grab a brush & dab some paint.... so instead I've spent some time getting some other things done in the basement.

To start, I have the luxury of access to a large format plotter & took advantage of some of the maintenance to plot off some various gaming mats to get the inks flowing through them after the 2 years of sitting they went through during the pandemic.

 


These mat patterns are all from one of the 3d printing Patreons I follow - Unit 9. Every couple of months they add some new themes to the monthly files.

 


I mounted them on the many pieces of foamcore that were saved from going to the dumpster at work.  These have been sitting about for some time & I wanted to start using them. I know others have had these printed on vinyl or mousepad material which can be rolled, but I wanted to keep it cheap...for now.

 


The mat files are offered in several sizes (2'x2', 3'x3', 4'x4') so I chose the ones I could manage with the minimum of fuss & taking into account having to store them afterwards. So now I have Cyber City, Hangar Bay, Wasteland & Underworld themed boards built.

 


I hope to use them in Stargrave & 5 Parsecs from home depending on the size of battle & number of players.

 


Overall I am quite happy with them. 

So next it was time to knuckle down & get working on some sci-fi looking rocks for our upcoming Stargrave game. It was then I found the box of a bunch of Lava type rocks I had purchased from Zuzzy many years ago.

 


I wanted to make them usable in more than just sci-fi..so stuck with traditional colours more or less. 

 


There were also several that had volcanic lava streams emerging from them, so I tried my hand at doing that...yes it took a couple of attempts & a couple of Youtube watches to get the 'Lava' to where it looked somewhat realistic.

So now I've got some more rocks on the paint table, but these are foam ones I've been dabbling with & hope to get them done Sunday.

I apologize for being absent from the blog these past few weeks, but we all go through these phases & its always great to be getting back into the groove!

 

Thanks for sticking with me!

 

4 comments:

  1. Those mats look superb Terry, but for me the star of the post is the lava rocks, you nailed them!

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    1. Thanks Michael, the Youtube videos certainly helped!

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  2. Othe rthan the lava rocks, the others look ideal for a whole lot of earthly environs too.

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    1. Its likely they will be used in a lot of games to come. Will need the desert yellow ones for Western games though I think.

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