I took some new pictures of the flagstone in the natural light today. These pics show off the colors much better, and as a bonus they’re not blurry! I got a couple pictures outside in the shade and a picture in direct sunlight for comparison. You can really see the texture and the variety of colors in these images. Enjoy!
Flagstone
Yeah, I decided to use the actual name for this instead of calling it cobblestone again, mostly because it actually looks like Flagstone now instead of funny shaped cobblestone. I did some work last night with texturing and painting the stones and it looks even better than before. We finally have something the looks random and rough, and not so uniform.
While working on a house last week with Tewfik we put together a small block to use as the base for the house (this post is coming soon!). After painting the flagstone it just looked too bland and uniform (and not so much like rocks) when put together with the house and miniatures. I got yet another idea from my girlfriend for painting though. This new method is quite a bit of work (it took me several hours for a 6″ block), but I think it looks excellent. I’m sure with some practice I can get the painting time down to something more reasonable.
Since I struggled to get a good picture of the final cobblestone with the lighting I had before, I rushed home today to take pictures while it was still light outside. Here are a few more pics of the final cobblestone in natural light and without a flash. They look a lot better this way, and a lot darker, but for some reason it looks more blue than it really is. Anyway, check out these new pics. Read more »
Yet another view of the final cobblestone
Well, after some more messing around with the cobblestone I think we pretty much have the method figured out. While I really liked the last piece from the last post I felt like there was something missing. At the suggestion of my girlfriend I decided to try mixing in some blue and that seemed to do the trick. A little bit of blue mixed in with the gray gave it that extra nudge away from simple grayscale and made it look really nice.
I’ve been testing out various methods with the blue to see which one works best. I’ve found that washes on the cobblestone don’t seem to work all that well, probably because the imprint isn’t all that deep. The trick seems to be drybrushing, lots and lots of drybrushing. It also helps to rough up the surface a little bit first to give it more texture and make the drybrushing work better. I’ll do a short “how-to” on the methods I used for the final cobblestone if you want to try this on your own.
UPDATE: I should probably note that the colors are done, but we’ll probably be adding bits of grass/weeds in the grout and other small details later as well.
Testing block
Over the last week I’ve been working to try and get our cobblestone (well, technically I think it’s flagstone) method just right. I’ve tested out a ton of different methods, so I thought I’d post up everything I’ve done up to this point so you can see all the iterations. I’ve tried drybrushing, washing, tracing with markers, priming/not priming, adding texture, and more. I think I finally got something pretty close to what we want, though there are still a few things to try out. I was quite surprised at how well something as simple as a gray marker has worked. I’ve been using it to add depth not only through coloring the grout, but to force a deeper imprint and fix up some areas that didn’t stamp so well. Read more »
A small block with the old stamp pattern, painted up
We managed to get some attempts at painting cobblestone in. It looks okay, but I’m not completely satisfied with the results. I do think that the stamps will work exactly as they are now. The patterns look great when pressed into the foam itself, now we just need to make it look good after painting… and to find a good way of painting without taking up WAY too much time. After going through several different ideas for color schemes (brown grout with dark grey stones, light grout with dark gray stones, and several other combinations) I think we finally settled for a dark grey grout with lighter grey stones. I like the basic color schemes below, they just need to look less flat and more like individual stones.
Cobblestone!
After the failed attempt at cobblestone on the well piece, we decided we needed a new idea. We needed something that would look like cobblestone and not just gravel. We also decided that buying tons of Talus was not cost effective (and finding enough rocks of the right sizes and shapes was not very efficient). I found an idea posted by DarkWingDuck on Tom’s Boring Mordheim Forums for making a cobblestone stamp. This was exactly what we were looking for… it’s simple, it’s consistent, and it’s cheap. Our requirements were slightly different so we decided to come up with our own method. Rather than creating a uniform, patterned cobblestone we wanted something rough and random for our city. We decided on using actual stones to create the pattern to give it a more natural look.
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