Games Workshop battleboard

I've started work on this now and hope to get it finished in the next couple of weeks.

The board comes in six 2'x2' tiles. Four have hills on one corner and two are flat. They come in grey plastic and are very heavy. They seem quite strong and my wife, who bought it for me for Christams said that in the Games workshop she bought it in they said that they had got a fourteen stone man (196lbs) to stand on it without it breaking.

The boards have some texture but I decided to add more to match the bases of my figures, more of which later. The first thing I needed to do was remove the skulls and bones that GW have scattered across the boards. I want to be able to use these boards for all periods so don't need this (rather unnecessary) addition. It doesn't take long to carve the skulls into what look like rocks as there are only half a dozen or so on five of the boards. The plastic is very hard, however, resulting in several cut fingers!

The real issue is going to be the sixth board with the skull pits in.

Carving these away will be more of a challenge! I did think about using plastic filler to fill them in but the boards have a fair bit of flex inthem and I thought it would fall out. Instead I have decided to turn them into a couple of ponds.

The next step was to undercoat them black and I used Citadel acrylic black which coats really well. The GW shop people told me it takes three cans to cover all six boards and that seems about right (I have only done four so far). I'm sure I could have got cheaper black spray somewhere else but I'm lazy so just got everthing in GW, pretty much.

Actually, the boards look pretty cool black and it has me thinking I need to do a Mordor one for the Lord of the Rings. A friend went to Iceland recently, to take advantage of the credit crunch prices, but she said that she couldn't live there as it was like living in Mordor!

The next stage was to paint the board a base brown. My wife got me the GW board scenery kit but I didn't like the brown colour they included which was too red. I paint the bases of my figures Humbrol 29 and had a bit of luck in that it is one of the few colours they do in aerosol cans. It takes a whole can to do one board, however!

In part two I will texture, highlight and add the grass!