Gormaths Gaming Table

[ash]

Well here it is, my new diary. New because the old one got trashed before I had even started it...

This is going to detail the construction of the gaming table I am aiming to build over the 4 months of this Tale of Gamers. As just about every aspect of this table is from GW bits and pieces its more of a converting and painting article.

I will be using the GW stuff I already have to start off with which amounts to a few of the Gothic Ruins Buildings and an old ruined tower. These will need to be cleaned up and repainted to fit in with the new table.

I will be doing work on these few pieces as I will not have the money to buy (yes buy) the table top for a few weeks (no prizes for guessing what purchase that will be

I will also be adding a Empire Manor House, a Imperial Sector, a few of the modular and gaming hills, the temple of skulls, some citadel woods, ork barricades, walls and hedges.....

Its going to be expensive but will look great!

So basically I am being slack and buying the premade stuff, converting it and then painting it all up.

The table itself will be painted in such a way that it can be used for pretty much all the systems I play.. as is its pretty good for things like 40k, fantasy, lotr and warmachine but if I want to use it for something like FOW then I need to build some specific pieces that cover up some of the stuff thats out of scale or just would look weird (like the cracks filled with skulls) A few scales woods and town buildings should do the work but those will come much later.

So yes, a frikken awesome table in my own games room with which to play games in the comfort (and warmth/cool depending on time of year) of my home and enjoy a few brews.

This should be fun and as its all done in my home I should have no reason not to thoroughly document every aspect of its creation and I shall start that this Sunday with the cleaning up of the pieces that I already own...

[ash]

The Epic Story That is ME!!

Now is time to reminisce on tables of old....

Cue 1988-89 and a young man called Ashley going to his mate Herbies house for his first ever GW game. Herbie was the guy who got me started on all of this so its him you guys can thank

We would be playing an older game called 'Space Marine' which was the precurser to Epic 40,000. He had bought in a few of the miniatures to school a few weeks earlier and I had traded them off of him for a few of my Inquisition Miniatures collection that I had started a few years previously. I had gotten a few bases of marines, a few bikes (they looked like something out of Akira) and a couple of Imperial Guard Walkers (the real dodgy looking ones but in tiny scale)

I had a go at painting them up but the scale was new to me so I was rather unsuccessful...

Anyways I arrived at his house and there sprawled across his loungeroom floor was a battlefield filled with rolling hills and a grand Imperial City. Well thats what my imagination told me.

In reality it was the premade buildings you got from the space marine box (these were cool, cardboard sides and a plastic roof. They looked like skyscrapers and they came in about 4 different heights) The hills were a few books stacked on top of each other... they were all varying shades of green as his mum had quite a library... and trees were the classic poor mans type; the little branchlets you can pull off your plastic christmas tree inserted into some cardboard.

This was my first game and I got absolutely trashed... I didnt know a unit card from a close assault factor (CAF for short) but it was fun indeed.

Let me get something straight here.. I had seen many gaming tables before. I used to venture into a little known store called tactics. Little known is somwhat of a lie as back then it was a mecca for gaming geeks etc. They had some pretty cool looking tables but this article is about the craptastic nature of the tables I have played on and owned in the past.

So I had just got my butt handed to me by the Feral Orcs of the Snakebite Clan so retail therapy was all that could be done to soothe my crushing defeatist mood.

Off to Tactics, his Mum drove us in and it was here that I bought my first ever GW product; RTB01 (for all the vets out there I need not say more on what this box is but for the younger gen to the game it was the first multipart plastic spacemarine box, if I remember correctly it only cost about $35 and you got 30 marines!)

www.solegends.com/citrt/rtb01marines.htm

It was here that I got the Orc bug. Orcs were cool, big and green but the books were still pretty expensive back then and I could not afford one.

So I had got the gaming bug but I needed my own gaming board with which to play out all the battles that were sure to come in the future. I was not too keen to play on the floor as to me it just seemed dirty and a little cheap. What I needed was a surface to play over.

I pulled my mattress off the bed base and slept on the floor as I sacrificed my comfort for my gaming. I slept on the floor for about 2 years before I got a second bed in my room with which to sleep on.

Scenery was of about the same quality as Herbies though I went all out and bought a green sheet with which to place books under. I still had the crappy christmas tree trees (my mum was not amused as our tree had lost about 4 feet in height....) I also made my first purchase mishap in the early nineties. I asked my mum to get me a copy of Space Marine for christmas. Christmas day arrives and I noticed the present was a little small. It turns out she bought me a copy of ultramarines which is possibly the worst ever GW boxed game... think space hulk without the genestealers... dodgy.

I also started having a real crack at making my own scenery around about 92-93. Having seen the movie Alien 3 rekindled my love for the Alien Style (Giger is god) I went out and hired Aliens which is still my fav movie in the trilogy and was inspired by the Aliens 'warren/lair' the organic shapes were very appealing. I had known about mixing petrol and polystyrene to make a slush but wondered if I could melt it in a more controlled manner.

Cue the dope, not the smelly sticky pine kind but the aircraft variety. This stuff is awesome for melting polystyrene. Before long I had turned all the packaging I had into a great series of rooms and corridors in a similar manner to Gigers designs. I also had a very smelly room and again an angry mother.

I sprayed the rooms black and painted them in a suitable manner. I also started experimenting with washes at this stage. I did not have any purchased but rather stumbled across the concept by mistake. I was running out of a color so decided to mix in more water to make it go a little further..... and wallah, the paint settled in the crevices and the lowest points adding a weird effect and by darkening the color with some black I had a nice looking shade... by pure fluke I had created my own wash.

From here I had made a series of terrain sets from jungles to watchtowers. Before long I even started to purchase and texture my own purpose built gaming boards.

Around 98 one of my mates built a sand board. It was essentially a sand pit built into a table. It was shit. It was heavy to move, looked blnd, sand is an abrassive so paint comes off, it feels terrible and I reckon I still have some minis coughing up a grain or two to this day. Stay away from these people!

2005 and I move to Renmark. My stuff stayed packed away for about 2 months till one day I go into my corner store and notice the GW stock. I had been in this store nearly every day for the last 2 months and never noticed it. I talked to the guy behind the counter (Sean) and was invited to a Friday Nights session.

It was great and there were many tables, all of them needing work. I weezled my way up the heirarchy (now many poeple would not know there was a heirarchy at this place but there was. Essentially it was Stoners and coffee drinkers at the top... I did not take part in either so I had work to do) Basically the first thing I did was teach people how to play Mordheim properly

Anyways within a few months most of the tables had been done up in a slap dash manner (working on 3 mordheim tables with a full complement of scenery at once sucks, even more so to have it done before a tournament 2 weeks away!)


2 of the Mordheim tables missing about 60% of the scenery from each.

Then I started on the city fight stuff. Now that was a saga 2 years in the making. I knocked out the full set of what was to be at that stage prototypes in about a week. They were played over, applauded for ease of gaming then shelved for about 18 months. Nearly all would be finished 2 years after their initital construction but there are still two more pieces needing to be finished (and not by me either)

Next was the desert terrain which to my horror was a joint effort. I hate working with other people on terrain projects. I have my own style which is hard for the other person to imitate. More than a sloppy job I hate terrain that does not match!


Steve and Simpson fighting over the desert terrain

I have made boards and terrain depicting just about all the classical worlds you see in the pages of whitedwarf but have yet to create an ice world. For some reason that has never interested me and still I have no real interest in making one.

Most of my terrain has been made from scratch from card, foamcore and balsa wood with a splashing of pva. Unfortuately without the right tols and casting abilities I'll never be able to make stuff to the standard of what you see in those gaming magazines but I would really like a table of that quality hence this project.

Now that I have stopped my own glowing awesome rambling on myself its off to start collecting the things that I require to make this project a reality.

[draconis]

Gawd thats bloody awfull pic of me

[ash]

Well it officially starts tomorrow and I have not got a great plan formulated. The first 3 odd weeks will just be me ranting about my project and cleaning up a few of my older bits of terrain. After that I should have made my major purchase and can really begin.

Goal for 1st Month: formulate a solid plan of attack, outline purchases for each month and have a Realm of Battle Gaming Board, a modular hill, a gaming hill and an Imperial Sector in my possession

[Skuller]

what starts tomorrow ash what ha ha ash ash what starts tomorrow??? ash ash answer me what starts tomorrow can u tall me ha *nudge* ha *nudge* can ya can ya tell me plzzz

[ash]

Goal for 1st Month: formulate a solid plan of attack, outline purchases for each month and have a Realm of Battle Gaming Board, a modular hill, a gaming hill and an Imperial Sector in my possession.


Above is the plan of attack I had formulated a few days ago. Sounds all good but there seems to be one small problem in executing said plan:







That people is the state of my gaming room as of Friday afternnon, since the time of that picture it has gotten even worse as I had rummaged through all my stuff in order to find my Magic cards (mana specifically) for last Sundays Conflux Booster Draft (I came second yay!)

There is stuff everywhere. All the stuff I used to store down at the store, some power tools, bits and pieces of terrain, boxes of magic cards, random board games, sourcebooks, codicies, templates, lego and even a Sponge Bob Square Pants Puzzle (god how I loathe him....)

It looks like I'll need to be doing a spot of cleaning before I get enough available workspace in which to build my table and terrain.

The table itself is already there located under all that stuff. Its a 6x4 foot 16mm MDF sheet supported by some el cheapo bookcases. I bought these bookcases in bulk for about $20 each I have 8; 4 for the 6x4 and 4 for the 4x4 skirmish table. They stand to about waist height on me which is almost the perfect height in my opinion as you bend down a lot less when playing games. Drawback is that you can not see the table from a seated position in regular chairs but seating is for slack wargamers and Paul. I plan on buying a few bar stools for around my tables....

I lack the adequate storage space to store all my stuff so I will need to do something about that aswell

Once I have cleaned some space I can get to work on my forst piece which is somewhat of a GW classic terrain piece:



I like this ruined tower base a lot. There is quite a bit of detail on it but at the moment it is as bought. Its grey with a little static grass.

I plan on removing the static grass, buff off most of the grey paint as its really flakey and will not provide a good base for further painting, hit it with rough coat, add some extra details and give it a paint. Once done a few patches of static grass to match the board and it should look real nice.

Anyways off to clean my gaming room.... (pics as I make progress ;D)

[ash]

The table is getting cleaner!
I had it so that most of the surface was clean but then somehow it got messed up again... I think it was due to me needing to find a box of Marauders that I had purchased quite a while ago. I needed them for a Pit Fighter Mordheim Warband and in the process of locating the box stuff ended up everywhere again

On the plus side I bought a nice new Temple of Skulls terrain piece today which after I have made a few mods should look great as a center piece to the table. I am not too sure exactly what I am going to do to it yet but its going to look cool!

I shall detail my progress on this terrain piece as I go about it.

Another great piece of news is that I finally have enough money to purchase the Realm of Battle Gaming Table and a few other choice pieces of terrain (two sets of modular hills and a citadel gaming hill) So I shall be ordering that Monday and will hopefully have it in my grubby mits by the following week!

Awesome!

[majordodo]

Glad its going well man. Hopefully Ill be sorted to start mine soon. Had to order my modem this week, should arrive monday/tuesday ^_^

[ash]

My stuff is paid for and should be ordered by now
All I got to do is sit back and wait.

Soon this diary can really begin!

[ash]

Awesome!
My stuff should be instore tomorrow!!!!

[ash]

Well after a brief stint of having no internet connection I am back!
I have made quite a bit of progress on my board and have many photos but right now my camera is dead and I can not find the charger
The second I can get the pics off the camera (could potentially use megs card reader in her laptop) ill make a monster of a post with plenty of pics!

Have also bought some planetstrike terrain so ill be adding that into this diary. Looks like by the time this is all over I'll have quite a nice GW terrain collection!

[ash]

MY ORDER HAS FINALLY ARRIVED

I'll go back to the beginning of last week and the very large order that arrived at the store.....

It had taken its time getting here to Renmark but it had finally arrived. The second that I saw the pile of boxes which were being held at Formula Paints next to the store I instantly knew that the large box contained my Realm of Battle Gaming Table. The box was just over 2 feet by 2 feet and probably 7 inches deep. Upon getting it to the store itself and having quickly placed all the store stock on the shelves I opened it.

The very first thing I saw was a black bag with the Citadel Logo on it. I had forgotten that this thing came in its own bag. I hastily opened the bag and set out the 2 x 2 tiles on one of the gaming tables and was very impressed. I have seen a few of these tables but never in bare plastic and on its own it still looked very nice. I even considered having a bare plastic game on it where all models used could be assembled and thats it; no undercoat, no basing. I reckon it would have looked kinda cool!

I had also ordered a modular hill, a gaming hill and still had my temple of skulls sitting around and test fitted everything on the board. The way the modular hills fit perfectly on the board is very cool and I could not wait to get it home and start painting and flocking it.

I took it home that night but there was a problem; I still had not cleaned up my gaming table....

This was quickly solved by pretty much sliding everything onto the ground and anything fragile was dumped on my skirmish table. I layed it all out and took a few photos for you guys to check out.












With everything home and set out I could finally begin my diary. I have made it a lot further than this but ill spread the details of my progress over a few posts. More either later tonight or some other time

[ash]

THE BAG

Ill also be detailing as an added bonus to this diary how I will be turning the bag the table came in into a vehicle transport case. The bag is really big and as I do not want to transport the table in it as it will no doubt rub off any flocking I glue to the table I think utilising it as a transport case is a really cool idea.

A few pieces of 3mm MDF and some inch thick foam shall do the trick.

Stay tuned for this bonus feature later in my diary!

[ash]

TERRAIN PAINTING KIT

As I have said the table looked great just sitting there in its plain grey color but this would not be much of a diary if I just left it that way. I cracked open the terrain painting kit which I had also recieved with my order and had a good look at the contents.

I had actually done this at the store but who cares... anyways... Inside this pack you get a large bottle of brown paint 400mL. Im not sure if this actually matches one of the citadel paint range. Its somewhere between bestial and scorched brown and has the consistancy of a foundation paint. Its possibly just house paint to keep the costs down. Still its quite a large bottle.

The second bottle was the Ochre paint 40mL which is used for drybrushing over the brown base paint. Same consistancy as the foundation paints and funnily enough its a really good match for Tausept Ochre (I am making this comparison from mind so if this is wrong let me know. I have close to 150 citadel paint pots here, 6-7 being Mithril Silver for some reason, and I did not fancy trying to locate the Tausept, and yes, I realise it would not be that hard to find as the foundation pots do look quite different but thats not the point even though it is.....)

The small bottle was only about half full!

You also get a small tube of PVA glue. I and the others who saw the kit at the store were very skeptical about whether or not this 118ml tube was enough. It had to cover almost the entire surface of a 6x4 foot gaming table. We will see.

A really large bag of Static Grass was in the kit. This mammoth bag more than made up for the $69 price of the kit. The flock itself was worth more than $100 and I had no doubt there was more than enough to cover my Realm of Battle.

A small bag of Static Grass was provided to help break up what would be a very dull surface. This is only meant to be applied in patches so there is enough.

The weakest link in this kit is easily the Citadel Terrain Brush. Its a low quality 1.5inch paint brush with the Citadel Logo stamped onto the side (which was already wearing off mind you) Through the course of painting and gluing I have dropped numerous bristles. I would suggest that anyone who buys this kit chuck it and spend $10 on a decent brush.

Besides the dodgy brush and the suspiciously small tube of glue this is a really cool kit and is easily worth the price of admission. Like I said, the Static Grass itself is more than worth the $69 you pay.

A funny little side note: When I recieved this order it would seem that customs or whoever it is that checks interstate packages thought the size of the board itself was a bit suspicious and worth a look. When I recieved it it had been cut open and resealed with security tape and a declaration of it having been checked. No biggie but I was wondering what would happen if they found the very very suspicious looking bag of static grass. Its large, fibrous, dark green with red fibres and packed like a brick.....


NEXT TIME

Well thats the contents of the Terrain Painting Kit. Next post I will describe how I went with it and the lessons I learnt along the way.

[ash]

Painting this board is really quite simple. It took me a good 2 days to paint and this is how I did it:

ADDING EXTRA TEXTURE

The very first thing I noticed when looking at the bare plastic of the table was that it has a lot of very cool textures. every square inch of the boards has some texture on it. The rocky outcrops have a very nice looking rocky surface. The skulls in the skull pits have individual skulls that make up the texture and every one of them is the equal of what you see in the undead skeleton range. The bare earth is even textured. It looks really great and there are little bone piles dotted around the place.

Although there is plenty of texture right out of the box I thought that a little more could not hurt plus it would tie theboard in more with the other terrain pieces I would be adding. I am a bit of a freak when it comes to terrain that matches. I think I have mentioned this before. I would be using the craters that are made for the Planetstrike 40K expansion. These guys are also nicely textured but its more smooth than the rocky stuff on the board, I would have to spray on some roughcoat to get them to a texture I was happy with and by doing the same on my board it would help to tie them in together betterly (yes, i said betterly)

So the very first thing I did to my Realm of Battle Gaming Board (RoBGB) was hit all the surfaces which were not bare earth with Rough Coat. I did not bother with the ground surfaces as they would be covered in flock.







It may be a little hard to see in the above pictures but the Roughcoat did leave the areas slightly lighter in color than the rest of the boards.

First lesson was learnt here... No matter how much packaging cardboard you put between the spraycan and the wall your landlord had freshly painted 6 months ago right before you moved into the house you will still seem to get grey paint on it!

Anyhoo I tried not to get too much roughcoat on the skeleton pits or bone piles as even though the texture in the can is really light I did not want to run the risk of ruining the nice textures. Where I did manage to get too much texture on the bones it justy looks like little pieces of dirt and will probably add to the effect.

I left the Roughcoat to dry for a good 6 hours before moving onto the next step of applying the basecoat.


BASECOATING

I was originally going to spray this board Chaos Black as it is made from the same plastic as GW miniatures and it is always suggested that you 'key' the plastic before painting but I skipped this step. Hopefully it will not bite me on the ass later

Painting was as simple as loading up the provided brush with Brown paint and slapping it on. Slapping is probably not the best word here as you really want as thin a coat but as even a coat as you can get. The paint is thick and you do not want to clog such nice textures. I used a circular stroke pattern as it was the easiest way to get it into all the texture.





The paint was still wet in the above picture and does look like it is obscuring detail. As it dried it sort of pulled itself against the board and the detail regained its clarity.

I did paint the skull pits but used a little water on the brush to thin the baint down a little. In some areas this still went on too thick so I flooded them with water and soaked it up with a sponge and reapplied a thinned down brown.

At this stage I also went over all the areas that would not recieve Static Grass and picked out all the bristles that the terrain painting brush had left behind. This was probably the most time consuming part of the whole thing and took nearly an hour to do. Seriously, bet yourself a better brush if you plan on painting one of these things, you really do not want to have stray hairs ruining the finish!

I then left the board to dry overnight and half the next day.



Above is the completely basecoated board drying overnight. I left space between each board as it dried so that it would not stick together.

Where there are skull piles on the sides of hills and rock outcrops the watered dwon paint ran a little in a dark brown color as the pigment was seperated. I just waited till the board was dry and tidied these areas up with more brown paint.

With the board basecoated I was surprised to see I still had half of the paint left. Good news as this mean I can paint all my terrain bases the same as the board and not have to buy another kit.


NEXT TIME

Next time I will talk about Drybrushing this beast.

[ash]

DRYBRUSHING

Drybrushing the table is pretty much straight forward but for those who have never DB'd a large terrain piece before I'll run you through it.

The Terrain Painting Kit came with a smallish pot of Ochre paint. It's a browny Yellow color and there is just enough to get you through the job with a bit left over for any terrain pieces you have left to paint. The mouth of the bottle is not really big enough to fit the terrain painting brush in so the first thing you will need to do is pour a little paint from the bottle into a bowl or something similar.

You want to ensure your brush is totally dry before drybrushing so if you have just washed it you can leave it aside for a few hours (make sure you give it a good shake out first to get rid of as much water as possible before drying).

The way I like to drybrush is probably a little different to some people but it works for me.

The first thing I do is get a little paint on the brush maybe about a quarter up the length of the bristles. I then pull the brush against the lip of my paint bowl in order to get rid of as much paint back into the bowl as possible to minimise wastage.

Next I rapidly run the brush back and forth over some newspaper. I do not use paper towel as I would if I was painting a miniature as when using so much paint on such a large brush the thin paper towelling will break and leave bits of paper in my brush which is very undesirable. Keep brushing it back and forth until there is not very much paint coming off of your brush.

Normally some people will then get straight to work on the terrain piece. That is not how I roll. I ill let it dry for about 2-3 minutes then repeat the dipping and brushing a good two or three times. When I do not do this I find that the brush is still too slick which is possibly due to some residual dampness or something. I am no brush scientist but doing it the way I do it tends to make the drybrushing work a lot better for me.

Now that I have a nice dry brush with a bit of paint in it I slowly do a test brush on one of the surfaces due to be drybrushed. This testing is very important as too much paint and the effect will be ruined as too much paint ends up on your piece and worse still brush marks will be visible and it is very hard to blend it back into the rest of your area and you will have to re basecoat the ruined patch and wait for it to dry!

If I am happy with how the initial test brush has gone I will go to work dry brushing the surfaces working across the grain if there is an obvious one. I work lightly and slowly build up the color till I am happy. Getting too far ahead of yourself and dumping it all in one go can end up making your piece look dodgy as I have seen many a time.



Unfortunately a few brush lines crept into the piece but they will be flocked over. If I were leaving it as is the marks are not too bad and could be blended in with a little fine DB work.

For this table I only used to one layer of drybrushing over the bulk of the table but there are a few key areas of which I lightened quite drastically as I wanted to ensure these stood out on the table. For these areas I prepared my brush exactly the same but this time I used a circular motion and started off lightly DBing on the outside of the area and got more firm working in.



I also ensured I got a good amount of drybrushing done on the skulls in the skull pits as thi will add another layer to the finished product (I love multiple layers on my fine detail) These will be finished off at a later date and I'll get into thast in my diary when I am done with them.

So now my table is fully drybrushed. If I worked it a little heavier it would look good as a desert table but as this is not how it will end up I am happy to leave it dark as when patches of flock fall away (as they eventually will) it will look like soil showing through.

Here are a few pics of the table at this stage






NEXT TIME

Flocking this table. It took a ery long time to do. Unfortunately I can not give you photos of it during progress as I have seemed to have lost my camera charger... Will instead show you some progress shots of some of the terrain pieces being flocked. When I have found the charger that is.....

[alex]

umm, so this planet is full of skulls?

[ash]

Yes it is. Its just a cool texture they put on the boards. They are sunken into the boards so its easy enough to get a terrain piece and cover them if they do not fit with the scale or theme of the game you happen to be playing at the time. As I play mostly GW stuff it fits alright but if I want to play some FOW ill just have made up some bases of trees and can cover those details.

[Doc]

flocking sounds like something else ;D

[draconis]

Jul 14, 2009 21:30:20 GMT 9.5 Doc said:

flocking sounds like something else ;D

Don't be so flocking silly...

btw, looks good so far.