In the last post I showed how I started the island board for Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago. In this one we’ll look at painting and flocking.
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.
