Some fancy painting

I've been working on the door frames and the floors since they're the only pieces that require more than the standard 3 color scheme.  All right, yes.  I could have done all basic floors for the rooms and left the door frames painted in the same scheme as the rest of the dungeon.  But where's the fun in that?



I'm going with very bright colors since they're meant to be seen from gaming distance.  No faux anything on these.  There's some floors that match but the rooms are all getting painted as I see fit.  Actually I need to finish building all the floors.

You can see the 2mm foam I use to base them on this picture.  Typically you wouldn't be seeing them from this angle and even now you can see that the foam doesn't go all the way to the edges.  The foam is multi-purpose.  It gives stability to the piece which is important on things like the door frames and the floors where they can be subject to stress when they're used.  It also keeps the pieces from scratching the table.  Lastly it gives a little bit of traction so they don't slide around.  It's not thick enough to call attention to the fact the pieces are raised above the table either.

I found I can paint 40 corridor sections at a time instead of the 30 I was planning for in the paint schedule.  More is good.  I'm using a finer brush so I don't get lines in the paint job.  You'll see them soon enough because once I get these done I can make a small layout for a photo session.  I'm alternating floors (easy) with the walls and corners (more work) and they should all be finished in at most 4 paint sessions.  In the middle of all this I want to finish building the rooms because they're bordered with the cracked floor tiles and I hate wasting painting time.

Quick update - corridors

As I said before almost every corridor section is a 4 x 4 square.  The only exception is the need for a 1 x 2 for the dead ends so the corners work.  Easy enough.  I've been slacking on other things and just pushed myself to start making these.  Of course I justified the break by saying I wanted to wait for my friend to ship me floor tiles he'd cast.  It sounded good.  And it was actually true.

Due to differences in how everyone casts the same bricks from the same molds may come out to be ever so slightly different.  In this case his tiles are slightly smaller than mine and I found that out when I used them under floors and corners.  My floor tiles required almost no sanding for the walls to fit, his required sanding.  So I'm mixing in a very careful way.



This is 47 corridor sections.  I don't even remember how many I need but I'll use up all the casts he sent in making corridors.  You'll notice the ones on the right have alternating white and grey tiles.  If I took a close up of one of them you'd see that the centers don't align at perfect right angles.  Yes, I used geometry to get a square out of them.  I really don't see a size difference in the completed sections when I compare them to ones made out of all my tiles.  I also haven't pulled out the micrometer since I'm not quite that detailed in this build.

Drying on the boards are 9 full sections and enough 2 tile sections to make 12 more.  I guess that means I can make 21 at a time with the space I have.  I'll go through the floor tiles he sent in not a lot of time.

I'm hoping to spend time this weekend building and painting.  I'm holding off on casting until I'm more certain of what still needs to be done.  And I plan on getting the cheap varnish I need so I can finish the ones I've already painted.  Time to buy tacky glue so I can attach the foam bases too.  I wonder if the weather is going to cooperate for varnishing.

Painting done on the pieces I started

I went through and did the dry brushing to complete the paint jobs on all the ones I had base coated.  One thing that didn't turn out correctly was the light grey highlight.  It's the color I've used on all my grey painted builds in the past but it just wasn't working here.  I couldn't tell the difference between the mid color and the high color when they were painted.  So I went to pure white.

It's a little stark but it should show up well on the game table.



I didn't show a picture of all the painted pieces since they didn't really show up well and the light was quite frankly pants.

Honestly I don't think the pure white looks bad as the final highlight since I was going for contrast.  I need to find a better way to paint the cracked floor tiles since they show brush marks more than the other kinds of tiles.  I might use a flat brush instead of the normal less-than-quality ones I typically use for this kind of painting.  It's only an issue on the floors.

I know of 2 mistakes that I will notice but probably no one else will.  They're not obvious enough to make me want to rebuild those pieces so I'm going to try to ignore them as much as possible.  One is going to be very difficult for me.  But it's a small thing and once I'm using the game board I hope it won't bother me much.

That's a small portion of what needs to be painted.  I'll be working in smaller batches going forward so I can get them completely painted and then move on.  It was kind of a pain to deal with the large number of pieces here.

I did start painting room floors.  One is waiting on touch ups.  One broke when I was working with it.  I forgot the large rooms are going to be more fragile until they're on the foam bases.  Nothing I couldn't fix and did fix today.  The other floors are currently frames since the A&K tiles are slightly smaller and I need to work in some filler to make them fit correctly.  I have an idea that I want to test this week.  If it works, great.  If not then I need to figure out another way to evenly fill the gap both in construction and then from the visible side.  I have ideas but they require me to hit the dollar store or the craft store, depending on where I can get the materials I need.

A nice smooth base coat

One of the multitude of problems with being a bit of a perfectionist is that I always have to go over the terrain pieces I paint and touch up all the places the base coat didn't cover.  Typically this is between bricks where they don't fit perfectly smooth and other such areas.  In this case it's also a lot of the floor tiles because I'm using the cracked floor and a lot of those cracks didn't take the first-second base coat.



Going forward I'm not going to base coat nearly as many pieces at one time.  I'm going to do the dry brushing and get them done before moving on to the next set.  I should have done that but at least I figured it out before base coating any more.

The only pieces I won't varnish and base are the door frames.  I want to have the option to do some fancy painting on them.  I'll know in plenty of time if I need to leave some plain since they're getting painted along with the rest of the pieces.  If needed I can always paint over the finished pieces later.

I set the arena aside since it's not necessary right now and I want to focus my time on this project.  I kind of wanted to have it ready for new year's eve but again, not necessary and takes time away from this required project.

Dungeon Bash Doors are Done!!

Yep.   All painted.  They need a coat or two of varnish but that's something I can do as time allows.  I needed the room on my paint table to do the touchups on the dungeon pieces so the doors needed to be done.  It didn't make sense to just move them when they needed to be painted.



Yes, that's a floor tile segment in the upper right.  I started the painting when I had black on the palette.

Up close the doors look just as spiffy.



I went with the "rougher" paint job with the silver to add interest.  Plain smooth silver isn't very interesting in this case.

Remember, these have 2 sides so this paint job is on both.

I did give in and touch up where I got silver on the wood/brown sections.  I might be the only person who would notice it but I'm really the only one who matters in this case.

Onward to painting lots and lots and lots of walls and corners.

Painting has begun, floors left to build

I had a post earlier but it looks like the blog ate it.

The painting has begun now that I actually have the paint.  I thinned it into a nice glass jar and have been merrily painting away.



As you can see I have no kitchen counter to do food things with any more.



You can see the progress along with some of the completed arena pieces.  I'd like to get 2 projects done at the same time and the arena just needs the same paint as the game board/modular dungeon.  So it all works out.

Base coating is messy fun!

I can't base coat terrain without making a fun mess. I'm using thinned latex paints and have to put the base coat on heavy so it soaks into all the details, nooks and crannies. So I end up with a lot of paint on my hands both from the pieces themselves and the painting process. Luckily it's latex paint so it just scrapes off.

I'm probably going to paint the pieces completely and then varnish them rather than move them around during the process. Otherwise I'd have to do even more touch up painting than I do now. Yes, I go back over the pieces with a small brush and fill in all the spaces the base coat missed. I'm just that way.

I'm also painting the arena I finally finished building. I know it has nothing to do with the game board but it's a project well on its way to completion and I'd really like to have it done. If nothing else it makes sense to paint it while I have the paints out and it's just sitting there in the way.

The game board pieces can all be base coated in one step. That's great! The arena pieces will take more than that but eventually will get paint on all the sides. I've learned to take my time and paint in sections when there's no easy way to hold the piece without taking the paint off in fingerprint size pieces.

Putting the paint in a glass jar works great. I can close it up and shake it to remix as needed and it should stay useful far longer than in plastic. The dry brush colors should probably also be moved to glass jars but I'm not sure where I can get those in time. The plastic I have now should work as a short term solution.

I can easily paint 25 wall sections in the space I have and probably add at least 10 corners. The arena is taking up space but it's been doing that for a while now. Eventually I can move it off to the side. Once it has all its stone painted.

Tomorrow I'm back to casting floor tiles. I need them for the corridors and I'm using up what I have making the room floor frames. My friend is sending me a whole lot of casts but they're ever so slightly smaller than my casts so I need to mix up how I build them into the corridor pieces so everything lines up. Now that I know it I can adapt. They're smaller due to variations in plaster mixes and shrinkage. Yes, these things matter.