Tuesday, August 22, 2017

One Day Build: Jedha Gaming Mat



FFG’s announcement of Star Wars: Legion at GenCon got me pretty hyped and I immediately started working on some terrain I originally had intended to use with my West End/Grenadier miniatures. 

Since I love Rogue One and especially the Jedha set, I'm obviously looking forward to have some games in this setting. Moreover, I am quite confident that the desert moon provides plenty of opportunity for thrilling scenarios, even if we might have to wait for Saw Gerrera and his Partisans for quite a while before they hit the battlefields. Therefore, I started a 6’x3’ Jedha gaming mat right away. 

Although proper gaming boards might offer better opportunites to detail your scenery, I prefer gaming mats over regular gaming boards since they are inexpensive, much easier to store and really easy to build. Furthermore, my wife had some spare cloth lying around...

I went for a rather fancy approach and used a sewing machine to seam the edges of my mat. This is highly optional though...

After that, I took all the material needed outside and prepared for texturing. For a simple desert scenery like Jedha, you basically just need cheap (!) acrylic sealant, acrylic paints and sand.

Just mix the sealant, the sand and the colours of choice and spread them violently on the prepared piece of cloth.

At this point you are actually good to go. You could already use your mat after it's fully dry. Thanks to the acrylic sealant, the mat will stay flexible and can be rolled up for easy storage and transportation. (Note that there's a lot of loose sand on the mat in this picture. This will come off once it's dry.)

I decided to add just a little extra detail by giving it a light drybrush just to make the structure of the mat pop a little.

And this is the result after a couple of hours of work. I might still add some little extra detail (grass tufts etc.) once it's fully dried, but for now my first Star Wars: Legion gaming mat is finished and ready to go...

10 comments:

  1. Really nice! I'm looking forward to more SW Legion hobby updates from you! Keep on.

    Best regards of also hyped
    Thorin

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  2. An excellent tutorial and excellent result. Well done!

    Frank
    http://adventuresinlead.blogspot.com.au/

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  3. Could you give us a bit more details on this please?
    How many tubes of sealant covers that size mat?
    Was the sealant colored?
    How much sand did you add?
    Did you trowel the mixture on?
    Thanks

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    Replies
    1. You need 4-5 tubes of sealant. No need to get the more expensive coloured stuff, just plain white. You can still colour it to your taste with pigments or colours. I added a bit too much sand. For this size you should probably go for 500 grams max but I didn't measure it... Just make sure your mixture is still spreadable.
      To get it on the mat, use whatever you have at hand... Hands, for example (use gloves though...)

      I wrote another short tutorial when I first tested this method back in 2011. Maybe that will help: http://finiatures.blogspot.de/2011/09/making-terrain-mat.html

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  4. That is very helpful - thank you

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  5. Looks quite good, and coupled with your rocks and a couple of desert buildings you have quite a bit of flexibility.

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  6. Hi, this tutorial is great! Some questions:
    - Which kind of Mat have you used? Where did you buy?
    - Is it possible to roll the mat after all the process? How do you store it?

    Thank you!!

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    Replies
    1. The mat is just the cheapest IKEA fabric I could find... I wrote another post on storage: http://finiatures.blogspot.de/2017/08/how-to-store-gaming-mat.html

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  7. I am definitely enjoying your website. You definitely have some great insight and great stories.
    IGGGames

    ReplyDelete