Scratch Building a Wargame Board - Almost Ready for Paint

Where We Are

The board is all dry. This stuff is mostly locked in—not going anywhere. Even the stray bits are locked in.

The Plaster of Paris Mix

Two parts plaster of Paris to one part water. Mix it up with your hand. Now we glob it on.

I was hoping the white texture from last night was enough, but I needed to bust out plaster of Paris. Otherwise it was getting way too expensive. Going pretty thick.

The Technique

After globbing it on, scoop up the extra and put it back in your bucket. We’re keeping that blistered look—this is going to add to it.

Then take a wet sponge and dab. Stipple. Go straight up, straight down. No dragging. That’s how we form natural texture and erase our pallet knife strokes.

Don’t Worry About Brittleness

If you’re worried about plaster being brittle, we’re going to hit this with so many more materials. I’m going all out on this. It’ll have so many additional textures—overgrown alien civilization vibe, but it could work for Warhammer Fantasy Battles or Warmachine.

Using Leftover Plaster

Dump the rest into a cheap, flimsy cookie tray from the dollar store. One side will be a completely flat sheet when it hardens. Then you can bust it up for ruined walls, basing material, or terrain projects.

The 10-Minute Working Life

After it sits a little bit, you get a different texture when you hit it. Now I’m going sideways to feather edges out. Use ripped up sprue and blister foam to take away harsh peaks—we don’t want it looking like Cool Whip out here.

Adding Thin Off-Cuts

Had thin off-cuts from the other board. Adding them with glue and pushing them into the medium to break up the seams. It’s never too late—that’s the cool thing about terrain. As long as you have glue and more trash, there’s always more trash to glue.

The Talus

Woodland Scenics talus (though you could use cat litter or dirt). I want the bigger chunks to create more textures and make the panel lines less obvious. The organic shapes will blur that line.

The Wetter Water Mix

70% Elmer’s glue, 20% water, 10% isopropyl alcohol. The isopropyl breaks surface tension so it goes down into all the cracks and locks the glue into place.

I put way too much on. It’s okay—it’s just trash, guys. (My mom said I had to stop cussing in my videos.)

Blending Stones

After fixing the dryer guilt-free, I lost my pallet knife. So using a busted brush instead—globbing on the AK Interactive earth texture and feathering it back out. Any places with brush strokes in the plaster mix, just dab on more base effect.

Our textures are really getting crazy now.

Transcript

Hey guys, what’s up? Uh, fresh cut, fresh buzz. I wanted to give you a quick update on where the board’s at and how we got here. Okay, here’s the board all dry. Like, this stuff is mostly locked in.

I just felt the one that was loose, but like this stuff not going anywhere. All that is locked in. Even these stray bits locked in. That one wasn’t. That one’s loose.

And if you want to know how we got here, stay tuned. All right, our board is flat now. Um, I just went ahead and used a spatula or actually I guess a pallet knife and started the initial gap filling process. So, it’s still pretty rough and I’m going to have to do more. Um, but what I’ve done is I’ve started I didn’t instead of just doing the seams so it’ be super obvious.

I’ve come into other sections here and put the material put like the same compound which is the this um around the board. I want to keep the blister peel, but we’re going to add a lot more texture to this. So, this is just the initial part. I’m going to let this dry and see where we’re at and then come back in and actually like make it so you can’t see the seams at all. What’s up, guys?

We’re back on the board. I’ve got mixed up. This is a mix of plaster of Paris and paperiermâché material. Um, two parts paper or two parts plaster of Paris to one part water. And I just stir it up with my hand.

And now we’re just going to glob it on. And you can see uh from last night where I hit it with that white texture. I was hoping it was going to be enough, but this uh I just realized like I needed to bust out some plaster of Paris. Otherwise, it was gonna get way too expensive. And you can see I’m going pretty thick.

All right, I’ll take this glove off and be back. Okay, I glob that stuff on just because I wanted you to see like how you can be messy and then come back. Like, we’re just going to scoop up our extra, put it back in our bucket, but I didn’t want to put too little and have to put the glove back on so it takes our paint better. And I’m just fanning this out across the board to keep our See, like I’ll come in closer here. like we’re still going to keep that blistered look.

And if anything, this is going to add to it. Okay, so this is where we’re at with uh just using the pallet knife. And it looks kind of like a hot mess, right? Like it’s you see the pallet knife strokes um where it’s still pretty thick. So we’ve got this kind of sponge here and brush with that old paint water.

And now we’re just we’re coming back in and we’re we’re dabbing. We’re stippling. that. See, this erases our strokes. And it’s important like we’re going up, right?

Back down, straight down, straight back up, straight down, straight back up. And I’m just doing that fast. And by making sure we don’t drag it, and we’re just going straight up, straight down. That’s how we’re going to form this natural texture. And uh if you’re worried about plaster being brittle, we’re gonna hit this with so many more materials just to like we’re going to go all out on this if I’m going to do it.

It’s my 2x two. Uh and it’s already taking up so much of my time that we’re going to go out all out on this. So, this is going to have so many additional textures on it. And really, I think we’re going to go like overgrown alien civilization kind of, but I could also do like Warhammer Fantasy Battles on it if I wanted a war machine on it. Uh, so see this wet sponge and I should probably get it wet again, but here we are.

We are going to keep like a lot of like this blistered jeez. Uh I don’t know what that was. We’re just going to keep a lot of this like blistered texture. And we really don’t want to like overdo it, but we still want to make sure like you can still see on camera like that seam is going to be there, right? Okay.

Here’s where we’re at now. I’m going to chill out on the plaster of Paris. You can still kind of see the lines, but we’re going to deal with that. I I’ve preserved a lot of the blistering still. Um, what we’re going to do is we’re going to add like gravel and sand and and flock materials that go over the border to blur that more and make it so it’s not super obvious uh or as obvious as it looks right now.

So, we’re going to let this dry and I’m going to show you what to do with all this leftover uh plaster repairs. All right. Cheap and flimsy. It’s important that it’s flimsy so you can bend it. Cookie tray.

Uh I got this from one from the dollar store. And I’m just going to dump all this bucket into the cookie tray. Okay, so I just dumped the rest of it out in here. I didn’t have enough to fill it. And I’ll probably give it a shake just to even it out and level it.

Um, and it’ll it’ll stretch out a little bit as it’s drying. But this is going to harden and one side’s going to be like a completely flat sheet. And this top should flatten out before it hardens. But if not, we can sand it. But then we’ll have flat panels that we can bust up and use if like you’re playing 40 40k.

It’s great to make like ruined walls. So you can like use it for basing material. You can use it on terrain projects. So this stuff has a 10-minute working life. And now that it’s been sitting a little bit and I also added some thicker clumps at other parts of the board just so it wasn’t like a X in the middle.

And now that it’s like sitting for a little bit, you’ll get a different texture when you come back and hit it. And now I’m I am going sideways to feather these edges out and down into the board. And now we don’t want such crazy peaks. And now we’ve got ripped up sprew ripped up blister foam. And this is going to just kind of take away the harsh peaks.

And I kind of like some of the harsh ones. So we’ll leave some of them. But we don’t want it looking like cool whip out here, you know. And since it’s again, it’s it’s almost dry, I’m like I can push these peaks down and it doesn’t pop back up. So, this will make it look a lot more like just different texture dirt.

And if you want, you can like mix sand and stuff in. Um, I like just doing plaster repairs by itself. And then I’m going to come back in and be a little bit more strategic with how I add like the sand and the ballast. So like just with the lighting and cuz we know there was cracks there. We can still see the cracks.

Uh and it’s come the cracks themselves and the differences are coming up on camera. But once I get back in here with the gravel and sand and other stuff, it’s going to just blur that out. And I’ve tried to keep as much of the blister effect as I can. So even where like like right here there’s actually plaster of Paris on it. You’ll still be able to see that blister effect.

So it’s not it’s it looks like it’s lost, but I don’t think it actually will be cuz it’s pretty thin on those parts. And I’m going to hit all those today, too. Uh I’m hoping I can finish the rest of those boards today of the square ones, but we’ll see. Okay, guys. So, I had to actually go get my tripod for this cuz so far this has been super janky because I’m supposed to be fixing my dryer and I think soon my wife’s going to catch on and I’m not working on it.

But the board isn’t actually this is getting close to dry, but it’s not. And I had all these like thin off cuts from the other board. I’m going to intersperse these around here now. So, I can actually like push this down in and this will help. So, what I’m going to do is I’m just I got some glue on the bottom of these.

And I’m just adding them in. I’m trimming them down a little bit because they’re still kind of too thick. Uh, but I’m adding them and pushing them down in to to the medium. And I don’t want to add a ton, right? Like I just I don’t want to overdo it.

Break up the seams. And some of this is already starting to dry. I should have thought of this earlier, but that’s okay. It’s never too late. That’s the cool thing about like this hobby and especially with terrain.

I mean, miniatures you can strip. So, it’s really like true with all of them, but it’s like it’s never too late cuz you can just keep gluing on. You can just keep painting stuff as long as you have glue and more trash. Like, there’s always more trash to glue. Uh, and this one I just took some chunks out.

And I’ll do the same on this one. Oh, this one’s going to be cracked. I got bit a little bit too little overzealous there. And actually like I I don’t want to put there cuz I like that scene already. Uh shoot.

That’s what we’ll do. We’ll put this crack over here in the corner. Okay. So now these squares, although there’s only a little like it’s going to give us like some This is actually connected to the ones over there. >> And let me do this is about to be like the moss.

And I’m going to do it over. I’m not overboard it. And what I’ll do is I’ll come back in with the AK interactive earth. And I’ll use that to blend in the corners. Here’s from another angle.

So again, like we’ll we’ll do our best like it’s it’s a lot easier to see the different material in it. So you’re obviously there’s a big cross in the middle of it, but once there’s paint on it and once we add more material, we’ll blend that out. Guys, I fixed the dryer. So now we’re back here guiltfree. But I lost my damn pallet knife.

I didn’t treat her right. and she left me. Um, I have a feeling if I were to open that drawer back up, she’s probably it’s probably in that drawer somewhere. So, instead of pallet knife, we just got busted brush. And what we’re doing now is just blending in our stones.

And see, I’m just I’m globbing it on and then feathering it back out. All right. So, we got most of our stones blended in. And I’ve also I’ve gone back through and any places where you can see like brush strokes in the plaster of Paris mixture, I just dabbed on more of the base effect. So now our textures are really getting crazy.

Uh wooden scenics talis. Um it doesn’t have to be like I would also not only does it not have to be I would say don’t go out and buy a wooden scenics uh when you can just buy cat litter or go get dirt. But I want this cuz it’s thicker. Like it’s bigger chunks. Um, and I had a train store got out a business close to me.

Our goal by adding this is one is to create more textures and tie it in to the board and make it less obvious about this work. We’re going to use this to pat out this change in elevation right here. So, I’m just kind of I’m gonna come back in over the top of this, but I’m just trying to think about what I’m doing and how to make this less obvious. This change in elevation from how poorly I did. See, the goal of this talis is to break up our panel lines.

And I think we’re like we’re definitely getting there. And like this one was the most egregious. So, now this organic shape of that and it’s not glued down yet. I’ll show you how I’m going to do that. will break up that hopefully break up that line now and I think we’ll be good.

Okay, so this mixture here is like 70 70% Elmer’s glue, probably 20% water, and then 10% isopropyl alcohol. And what that is isopropyl alcohol does is it breaks the surface tension. So, it’s going to go down into all these cracks and lock the glue into place. I think it’s called wetter water. Uh, and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.

So, see, we want to just make sure we get everything covered and then this will soak into that. So, as I’m sure you were thinking watching me do that on video, I put way too much glue on here. I’m so going to back up. And it’s not a big deal cuz who cares, right? It’s just trash, guys.

Actually, my mom said I had to stop cussing in my videos. Uh so, it’s just trash, guys. It’s okay that we put too much glue on it. So, we soak that up. That’s going to be fine.

Uh the rest of these that I did off camera, uh there’s a couple spots like this right here I’ll soak up. Uh but those are mostly good. So, here we go. Look at this. inside the paper towel roll.