Terrain mat time!

Some medium-to-longtime TMPer's will remember my old terrain mat, made with Woodland scenics flocks that I put together back in early 2011.  I used the latex caulk method of creating one that has been popularized mostly by War Artisan of TMP, who uses it to great effect for his 10mm armies.  The one I made came out pretty well, although I made a few mistakes that somewhat limited what I could do with it.  The big thing was using canvas that was waaay too heavy, too thick, and this meant that it was a bit too stiff to fit over top of the items placed below it to create hills and ridges.  Creating roads and rivers directly into it was quite difficult as well, and the latex caulk was not a very easy medium to work with.  It sticks to everything and is very hard to manipulate one placed down.  The advantages of using latex caulk is that it is extremely resilient.  The end result wasn't bad.  I think there are some pics on TMP somewhere, and if I get a chance I'll post some on here so you can see the old style one I did.

This time I wanted to create a very specific item.  I wanted to make a battle mat that would look as seamless with my 3mm brigade bases for Blucher as possible.  One problem I always notice with 28mm figs, for instance, is that the basing always makes the figures appear separate from the terrain board.  I want there to be a more holistic look to my final project.  Also, I didn't want to spend too much money.  I also wanted it to be simple and robust.  Quick, fast, cheap and good.  Can I make it work?  Am I insane?  We shall see...

First step was determining the basic design.  For the base-layer of my basing I'm using sifted dirt from my garden because it has a very fine texture and  decent earth tone to it.  I'm operating on the theory that the less noise on the brigade base the better the final product will appear to the viewers eye.  Therefore I'm going to avoid the almost ubiquitous stain/highlight method of making the dirt "pop."  This is partially experimental, but I think that there is something inherently odd about making dirt "pop" on a base.  Right?  Does dirt "pop" in real life?  Hell no!  It just sits there.  And like I said, at the3mm scale I believe it simply distracts from the real focus, which is the way the eye perceives the figures moving in formation.  Flowers, for instance, although they have a place in a 28mm figures base, are actually a very major distraction in 3mm figures.  I've therefore avoided scattering different colored flocks and am using just one, Woodland Scenics Medium Green flock.  Of course I'll bring in some other material for accents, but I'm going to see how far I can take the basic premise.

I found a nice piece of light canvas at a dollar store a few months ago and used it for a previous project where I re-created the road network from a Ferraris map with Woodland scenics flock, at a scale ratio of 20mm=300m, so my map would have shown all the roads in a 15 mile square area.  It was designed so that I could do operational level games with it, but I never really got it to work the way I wanted, so I had to abandon the project.  I still had the canvas though, and so I decided to use the reverse side as my base.

I decided that I'd use the same dirt as the base color as I did on my brigade bases.  This was more complicated that it might sound, actually, and I stumbled upon a best-practice that I'm hoping will reap major benefits in the future when I do larger mats.

The canvas is 5' x 5'.  You'll notice a square shape in the upper left area of the canvas that takes up about half the area of the mat.  That's the reverse side of the worked-on portion of the mat from my operational project.  Now, on that section I went old school:  I put down glue, then dropped down the dirt.  I then realized that a much better way of doing it was the  to put down the glue and then work the dirt into a kind of mud and force it into the canvas.  That's what you're seeing on the right hand side.  At the bottom you can see another variant.  There, I sifted the dirt directly onto the canvas and then, using my (house slippers) shoes I ground the dirt into the material with brute force.  I then applied an exact 50/50 PVA/water mixture over top of it and worked it in with my hands.  This was harder to do on the reverse of the previously worked section, because there was already dried latex paint on the other side of the canvas, not to mention dried PVA and flock.  If I ever started one of these from scratch this step would go really fast.  As it was it still went really fast.  I don't think it would take more than 30 minutes to get a 8x5 foot mat prepped in this manner.  Oh yeah, and you can ignore that spray bottle- I ditched it pretty fast and just began swirling the mud around with my hands.  I'll use it later, with a much more thinned out glue mixture, to seal the project when I'm done.

Here's a close up of what I think is the best practice if you're trying to make a dirt mat:

You can see that it's really smooth compared to the part on the left, where I dropped the dirt into the glue.  I ended up breaking up as much of that as I could so I could re-do it in the manner on the right. It was a lot harder to get that part of the cloth to take it so I ended up having to use a few more layers of 50/50 PVA to get it to work.  When I was completely done I transported it out to the lawn to bake off in the sun:

I then cleaned up and made my GF and myself this on the grill for lunch:

Ahh, California!

Back outside the mat was completely dried off and ready to rock.  I used a total of 10 bottles of PVA glue on the thing, which cost me $6.  The canvas was $5.  The dirt was free-ish.

I was almost out of glue so I was only able to do up the one corner.

Not too bad!  The only question was, how would it look with figs?

... and a higher angle shot.

It's a bit bland right now, but I think that's mostly because there's no other terrain.  My main goal, that the figures, bases and terrain work together instead of against each other, will probably come off.  I'm going to do a little more work on it tonight, including putting some roads in, although I'm going to leave water off of the mat for now.  I don't have a really good way of doing it plus I feel that when you work a river or stream into a mat you really limit the possibilities for elevations and such, since the water way will in large part determine the terrain around it.  

Anyways, I hope you guys found this interesting.  If you're ever debated making a terrain mat and latex caulk seemed like too much work, smell and mess, the dirt/mud mat might be a viable alternative for you.  It's definitely cheaper and faster.