Cue the research montage as I spent many hours learning about small sailboats, their uses and their forms. Once I’d settled on a sloop as being about the right size (small enough to fit on the island board, large enough to carry a crew), I rummaged around for what options are currently available.

Firelock Games make a fantastic sloop kit, shown below. Their’s is a gaff rigged layout with the squarish sail at the back.

I found a few decent scratch builds as well, I’m a big fan of Jim’s pirate sloop, again shown below. Always love seeing other people’s take on something I’m about to start. Great way to get inspiration and see how they solved issues you know you’re going to face.

Obviously, based on what I’ve said recently, my go to material was going to be foamed pvc. I used 3mm sheet for the sturdy parts, but the last of my 1mm supply made the curves so much easier. The shape of the base was sketched onto foamboard. This was then covered with balsa wood scored with planks. Masts are two sizes of dowelling.

Following the excellent guide from 1000footgeneral I rigged the boat. I used black elastic cord which was surprisingly easy to manage. The only issue I need to resolve is the horizontal parts in the ratlines are a bit skewed. But I don’t think it impacts the overall effect too much.

I spent a lot of time drybrushing, and redrybrushing the wood to try and get the colour right. It ended up a little oversaturated more weathered looking than usual, but I think that actually works well enough for a boat. Overall really happy with my 28mm sloop. Next project is to paint up the rowing boat and potentially have a go at 3D printing a couple more!

(I’m slowly catching up on documenting my projects from over my hiatus. Hopefully a lot more of them from now on will have WIP photos).

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They are very simply a piece of foamed pvc, then plastic aquarium plants, some clump foliage and some lichen. It needs ground cover and then I’m going to just try hitting the plastic plants with a wash to see if I can take the shine off them. I’d rather not paint them all if need be.

Speaking of foamed pvc, have I sung it’s praises here yet? I discovered this a fair few years ago through Anteoniciti’s when it was still a pretty unusual choice for modellers I guess. But it’s strong, light and so easy to carve, as you’ll see in one of my new projects. I love it, would never go back to plasticard or foamboard for blocking out builds.

Anyway, I have a box full of aquarium plans just waiting to become more jungle foliage. This is about the biggest piece I’ll do, it’s about making small paths and narrow clearings. I want the board to feel crammed. I also want to do a couple of small rocky outcrops just to give the board a bit or verticality.

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The first step was blocking out the colours. The earth and beaches are now base coated. The sea bottom left is done, and the top two are modelled but not yet painted. And bottom right is still waiting for the tissue waves to arrive. I’ve tried many techniques for rocks over the years, but on such a small board like this, with very little weight to it, actual rocks always give a nice result. So I went out with a bucket and acquired some from the side of the road (not other peoples’ gardens!).

House paints work great for this kind of terrain, you don’t need to be dainty and there’s no point wasting decent acrylics! So a couple of tester pots, Forest Floor for the, erm, forest floor, and Cafe au Lait for the beaches.

Now it’s fully primed in base colours, it’s time to start highlighting. Drybrushing, lots of drybrushing.

I also broke out the airbrush for one of it’s first uses, and tried to give the water a fade effect up to the beach.

You can see above the water turns lighter and greener nearer the shore. I also gave the rocks a black wash then two or three layers of drybrush getting progressively lighter. And of course I’ve added some grass, a couple of different lengths of static grass. This was my first attempt with my static grass applicator, some of the strands stand up, some are still laying down. But when I cover the board in dense jungle should work just fine.

I tried to leave the grass patch in places, so I had already drybrushed the earth to allow for this.

You can see from the aerial view above, the centre cover panel actually got split into three pieces. This allows it to sit inside the bottom right and top left corners and the whole board to still close correctly. Transportable terrain!

Overall, super happy with the final island board. The water looks pretty good (I drybrushed the tips of the waves white after varnishing, but it doesn’t show too well above), and the beaches are nice and white. I need to get on with the jungle terrain (pt3, but that’ll be a while since I only have one prototype piece done), which will turn this from an open island into a proper dense jungle wilderness.

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Like all my tables I wanted it to be portable (we’ll get to the eventual fate of Stadtheim the modular town later), so I turned to my usual source, paste tables. The X-Wing board I built was going to be star field on the outside, then death star surface on the inside. But interest waned, and the internals never get finished. And it was just sitting there. So I figured why not? Star field on the outside, tropical island on the inside.

The first step was to plan out how I wanted the island to sit. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me to restrict the table space by having a complete circle of sea around it (the table is 30.5″ by 34.5″ so we’re already pretty snug for F:GA). But I wanted water, and beaches, and rocks. I ended up settling for a cross shape of land, with four patches of water one in each corner.

Here you can see the basic shapes roughed out, the white polystyrene is inked ready to be cut, then the blue foam is going to form a layer on top to thicken it out to the depth of the frame, and give a shapeable surface layer.

Lots of stabbing with knives and a hot wire cutter later, the beaches (top left and bottom right above) where shaped. Then I added two inlets (bottom left, top right) along with the rocky outcrops in the sea. The black marker lines show my plan for dealing with the very obvious hinge joint.

Jump forward a little and you can see the texturing has begun. There’s regular sand, then herbs to mark out jungle paths (and make it all smell lovely). You can also see the raised piece of blue foam still visible top right, this covers the hinge and makes the board a little more seamless.

Somewhat obvious though is the lack of sea. I used the same process as I did for the Stadtheim water, but taking more care to shape the waves lapping towards the shore. So pva and tissue paper and patience makes water!

And now it’s all ready for paintwork, which will come in the next episode! Stay tuned for the rest of the island board project.

[Part 2 is now online]

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