Ogre Terrain Boards #3

Well, I've been working on these terrain boards for quite a while now, and they are starting to look pretty good. Well, to me at least. There are some amazingly talented people out there creating breathtaking terrain, and I'm not one of them. Anyway, I took the boards I made previously and carved some craters and depressions in them, and glued on some low hills.

I had thought about creating some mountainous terrain areas, but in Ogre scale, a 1" tall hill is pretty high. I used a hot wire foam cutter and a hacksaw blade for the rough shaping, then sandpaper and finally a green scratch pad to clean things up. What a mess! Thank goodness for the shop vacuum.

Once everything looked fairly smooth, I took them out to the garage and painted them with some light yellow latex paint left over from another project. This was just to seal the boards, and give something for the terrain materials to stick to. I let the boards dry for 24 hours or so.

I took one board at a time back down the basement and laid it out on my work table with lots of newspapers underneath. I made up some thinned glue mixture in a spray bottle. I used about 35% white glue, 60% water, and the rest was denatured alcohol to make sure the glue spread out easily.

I sprayed down the first board thoroughly, as in really wet. Then I started sprinkling some brown craft sand I picked up from Hobby Lobby. I covered the whole board with the sand in a thin layer, and let the board dry for about 12 hours.

The next day I lifted one end of the board and let the loose sand slide off. I tapped the board a few times to dislodge all the loose sand, then poured that sand back into my container for reuse. I sprayed down any areas that looked thin, and reapplied the sand. The board edges were especially tough to get covered well. This process was repeated for the other 3 boards until all were covered. I sprayed another coat of glue over all the boards to lock the sand down. I let them dry for another day or so.

I moved all the boards back downstairs to my work table for painting. I used a thin brown wash to highlight the craters and dry riverbed, then I got out my airbrush and sprayed a couple of lighter sand shades on the hills and wherever the sand looked too uniform. I'm still debating putting any kind of green on these boards, like thin grass or a few trees. Maybe later.

I think they look pretty good, although I am considering adding a few wrecked Ogre miniatures and debris here and there.

The next big step is coming up with a way to transport these to Origins in my car. Some sort of frame to allow stacking them is probably the way I will go.

I thought I'd put up a picture of my last terrain attempt, a replica of the original Ogre crater map using Heroscape tiles.

It still gets used occasionally. Maybe I'll make a GEV map to go with it someday.