A home made desert coloured caulk terrain mat

I’ve had a few busy months with work but thankfully I’ve also managed to paint quite a bit, recently its been mainly Vikings and Normans and before that I finished off my Footsore Baron’s war figures. I’ve also just finished the Norman Fort I bought in the Grand Manner Buildings bare resin sale. I just need to finish some basing and when more shield transfers arrive from LBMS I’ll complete them and take a few pictures.

Despite the fact that I have a large 15mm Napoleonic solo game set up on the table I’ve been distracted and only played a few turns.

A fictional Peninsular encounter

Lots of Minifigs in action

these are my basic terrain boards, I need some desert type terrain

The inevitable distraction has been my effort to make an acrylic mat for my Pony Wars and Crusades games and I made a start on this a few days ago beginning on the afternoon of the recent Matariki public holiday here in NZ. My recent Pony Wars post highlighted the poor quality of my base cloth and I’d long ago promised myself that I would rectify this. My 28mm Arab and Crusader bases reflect the arid terrain that I assume they mainly fought over and will not match the base terrain I have above. I have this thing that figure bases should ideally match the terrain boards on which they sit.

This was played pre-tarting of TSS terrain boards

I’ve since added another unit of Artizan Black Guard and some Gripping Beast Moors to this army

This picture is better at shows the way these figures are based

Consequently having bought a plastic backed drop sheet, lots of Selley’s acrylic caulk, some test pots of paint to match Vallejo Flat Earth and Iraqui Sand shades, isopropyl alcohol and some grit and builders sand I set to work

I had earlier watched different YouTube videos looking for ideas and mechanisms, there are so many but this one gave me the basic ideas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5W4FKqRbSs&t=22s

Working on the garage floor did not do my knees any favours!

This is when I discovered its easier to mix the paint with the caulk before adding the sand!

I basically mixed 2 tubes of caulk with a set amount of sand and brown paint but even then got quite a variation in colour

this is about 2 tubes of caulk worth

This is when I ran out of caulk and made a quick dash to the DIY store!

The end result after about 4hours of work – my mat is around 12 foot x 5 foot in size

This shows the variation in colour with each new batch of mixed caulks of caulk

I left this to dry and the following day I finished off the edges and re-caulked any areas where the base cloth showed through

A few days later I drybrushed with the Iraqui Sand type shade and also repainted my old Pony Wars hills

How this for storage – a 12 x 5 foot terrain mat

In the end it was much easier than I had expected, does not seem to peel off though maybe time will tell, the caulk gives it some texture and is the main thing that I see missing with the commercial mats that seem to be available.

In the end that leaves me pondering whether I should make another with flock and replace my terrain boards, it would certainly take up less storage space. Time will tell