Tabletop Geeks

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.

Unfortunately, I had a bad day with the camera so I apologize for the quality of these pics. I plan on taking some non-blurry ones in better light today, it was just too late last night to re-do the pictures.

In addition to testing out the new painting I also decided to try out some different texturing techniques as well. It’s hard to tell here but the right piece of this was actually sanded to be a little more rough.

Tracing the grout with a pencil

There was another minor change in the method that seems to have helped a bit as well. Instead of tracing the grout with the marker first I am using a pencil. It’s a harder and sharper edge so it cuts into the foam better.

Testing out different bases

I tried out using a base of black and a base of gray. I figured using a gray base with this new method might remove a step by not needing to go back over the grout.

Flagstone!

I then put down some gray, blue, and black paint and went through the process of hand painting each and every stone, constantly mixing the three colors to achieve tons of different shades of grays and blue-grays.

Flagstone

After the rocks all dried I drybrushed a light gray and a white on top to add some highlights and texture. I think I went a little heavy on the white at the end, but overall it looks excellent.

Tracing the grout

And finally I traced over some of the grout with the marker to see how it looked with a darker grout. This picture is a little blurry but if you look at the left side you’ll see where I traced over the grout with the marker. I like the grout being a little darker, but I don’t know if the marker is the right method. It seems to get on the rocks themselves too much and I think just using a darker gray as the base might fix this.

You might notice that the sanded side (the right side) didn’t really seem to benefit much from the sanding. Simply using a stone to press into the foam for some texture still seems to work best. Also, the black base looks a little messy in some spots. The gray base seems to work just fine, though.

So there you have it… flagstone! A few minor tweaks and this could be perfect. Keep an eye out for another post coming soon from Tewfik about the 2 story foamcore house we built last week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under Terrain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.