The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 4: Painting and Detailing the Boards

 

As alluded to in the previous post, the next step was to get my hands on some new things to create detail on the boards. Luckily there's a Dollar Tree next to my regular grocery store, and dollar stores usually have all manner of good stuff on hand. The finds this time were a set of really great iridescent fake pearl things, which came in TWO sizes (excellent for looking natural) and these knockoff kids building toys, aka "building circles".  Not pictured- fake wheat from the fake flowers section, great for swamp plants. I'll come back to the building circles- they're actually fodder for tokens, not the boards themselves. 

I glued down the iridescent pearls in nooks and crannies throughout the boards, thinking of them like a geological deposit or fungal material, perhaps. I'm quite generous with white glue on the boards, as it creates good gloppy texture, and some of the pearls slipped or ran down off the board in other locations- and that's fine. Most of the gluing in general is done with white glue, since it's cheap, non toxic, and I'm not in a rush- letting things dry overnight is generally fine. 

From there, finishing the boards involved many rounds of drybrushing, moving from darker colors (purple, magenta) to very bright ones like a vivid yellow and lime green. I did this with a 2" or so house painting brush, trying to concentrate the lighter colors on the top of the Mass, but also blending over the pearls and other features to integrate them. 

I struggled a bit with material to imply water for the swamp. The boards weren't built with a lip to contain a proper resin pour, and I didn't want to order a bunch of resin for the project. I briefly contemplated getting the bar top epoxy from Home Depot, but it's relatively expensive and takes 72 hours to cure, which was more time than I wanted to give to that phase of the project. So, finally, I just decided to take the poor man's route and pour white glue and hope for the best. I tried to concentrate it in areas that would have maximum effect. It dries sort of clear, sort of cloudy, which is OK for a swamp. The final fix was to wash it with a very bright green acrylic- that gave it a nice contrast against the earth and the Mass, while still letting some of the base texture show through. 

The final swamp details were some lichen and moss material I've had around forever- there was a period in grad school when I was very into scale models as art (I shopped at all the train guy stores) and I'd been schlepping a bunch of Woodland Scenics supplies around since then. I also acquired some Woodlands rubber molds for casting plaster rocks in this phase of my life, and they're just great for game terrain. Awfully handy when one decides to return to tabletop games in midlife. 

The last details for the board were making a kind of plinth for an object that will appear in the final game (no spoilers yet!) and then building a bunch of ladders out of 1/8" square scale lumber. I really like making terrain/buildings for orcs and goblins because everything can be messy and sloppily crafted- so I deliberately broke the lumber as opposed to cutting it, and then cut the short bits in bulk with a not-super- sharp chisel, which kind of crushed the ends instead of making clean cuts. I tried to dip the ladders in thinned black paint as a base (I find ladders annoying to paint) but this dissolved the white glue, so I surrendered and got my fingers all covered in brown paint. That plus a little off-white drybrushing and they're all set. 

(I know, you might ask, why not spray paint? Like pink foam, I've been trying to get spray paint out of my life and my studio for years. I really don't like it, it smells bad, it makes a lot of waste that's hard to dispose of safely, and one is always left with six mostly empty cans of colors one will never use again and that just sit around being a fire hazard. But spoiler- I DID break my rule when it came to making tokens...)

So these are the four boards (though I'm reserving some details for the day of the event). I'm delighted with the level of texture and unearthly color palette that they eventually took on- it feels very much like the unfamiliar/extraterrestrial/ambiguous world that the Mass might come from. 

As is usual in making things, I like to bounce back and forth between parts of the process. So, building the boards informed the writing of the game scenarios, and of course the initial ideas for the scenario inspired the the boards. The key is that I didn't have all four scenarios written before starting the boards- I find it easier to let different parts of the process inspire each other, and I think that's generally much more exciting, productive, and helps keep me from getting stuck. But now I'm committed to the boards, so that's off the list. Next up- a bit of thinking about my writing process, then onto making tokens and NPC models!