Terrain Mat part One

Earlier in November, my family was away for the weekend, and I got little done while they were gone, instead spending time with my sister and playing video games. (Classic XCOM).

When they got home late on that Sunday afternoon, my wife encouraged me to involve the kids in a project that I have been wanting to do for quite some time.

In the spring, a neighbor moved out, and for a few days had a bunch of random wall "art" out in front of their house to give away. My wife picked up the last piece with the idea that she would repaint it with the kids, as she has done with other canvases in the past. However, like many projects, no progress was made for a while, and the painting lived in the garage.

After several months, we pulled out the painting, and put it in the backyard where kid painting occurs. The paint was basically falling off, and we began to peel it off as we were doing other things.

After a few weeks of it sitting around, I got serious about peeling off the paint, and realized that it was sticky on one side... was it glued?  A quick soak with the garden hose proved that it was, and everything came off much more quickly after that.

So now we have a 91x119 cm blank canvas, and my idea was to make it into a play mat.

The kids were enthusiastic once they got into the idea, and they wanted to make a design with a road and a river (the maps of the battle of five armies and the battle of the Hornburg I had showed them may have influenced this a bit).

With a pen, they sketched out a plan on the canvas, and then I had my son measure the road segments so that they would be approximately 40mm wide (suitable for a 15mm dirt road or a Warmaster base)

After that we gloved up, and started mixing caulk and paint and smearing it on.  After slapping on a section of caulk, we then sprinkled a relatively heavy coat of the primary flock, followed by dustings of other flocks, static grass etc.  I then crudely rolled it in with an empty caulk tube, although this was not very successful due to the canvas still being on the frame.  Unfortunately no pictures of this phase, my hands were too dirty, and my wife was busy.

After less an an hour (and one change of clothes for the kids), we got to this stage:

You can see here that there are quite a number of colors, and some texture imparted by the caulk.  The roads and river are currently unfinished. After this dried for a few hours, I carefully dumped it off onto newspaper, and put it in the garage to await the next step. The flock and such dumped off was recovered, and equaled about 60% of what went on in the first place, more because of all the other flocks added than because it all fell off!

Tools used:
Paint stirring sticks
plastic tub from the recycling bin

Supplies used:
Two cans of paint, matched to GW Scorched Brown, and Vallejo Earth
Two tubes of flexible paintable caulk
One bag of flock
Various other flocks, static grasses, and herbs

Next step: have enough time to do the road and river sections.