Having cut out the board and completed the town planning it was time for some road building.

This is probably the most time consuming part of the whole process which began with cutting up old business cards into irregular square and rectangular shapes about 10-15mm in size  to be used for my cobblestone road. These were then laboriously stuck on individually to create a cobblestone effect. The same effect can be used to create shingled house roofs.

Now I know that a Mediteranean or Carribean town would be unlikely to have cobbled roads but I also want to use the same base board for my “Warmington On Sea” games of Sea Lion by just swapping the thatched huts for Knights of Dice “Letters Home”  Village sets (I am using their church in this scenario).

There are less time consuming methods than this but this is cheap and I like the effect. Another idea worth considering is using a thick pencil to draw them on. The indent into the hard polystyrene will create the same effect and allows more creativity with the shapes. I will use this method for the balsa wooden planks on the pier. Drawing the individual boards on the balsa wood and dots for the bolts creates a good effect, but more of this later.

I then painted them with a flat black to provide the “mortar highlight”.

They were then dry brushed a dark grey.

 

And hightlighted with light grey and brown ochre.

 

They were then “sealed” with a cabots polyurethane sealer. I find this works well where terrain is going to have high usage. Later I will seal the “flocking” with it as well as this not only seals the basing material but both hardens and stops it from brushing off.

The cliff edges were then painted in Haymes paints  mushroom brown and drybrushed white.

The whole base board was also painted with the same colour to ensure their was no bleed through the basing of any of the black used for the roads.

The base board is now ready for my generic mix of very fine beach sand (living on an island is handy for this) and various coloured and tectured flocking materials.

I paint the surface to be flocked with aquadhere (Step 1) and sprinkle on the colour basing material I want (Step 2), generally in a 6″ square patch at a time. I use several colours of flocking in the 6″ square. I then brush off the excess material and sprinkle heavily with the fine sand (Step 3). This is brushed off to give the final look (Step 4). I find this provides a uniform look that links the various patches of colour and fills any gaps. If there are any gaps showing you patch these and  then move on to the next section and begin the process over until the whole surface is finished.

Step 1:

At this stage if you want any rocks, bushes, twigs for tree truncks etc. you add them. As I need a flat surface to place buildings and other terrain on I want the final surface reasonably flat. If I need these features I will add them at a later date using separate  bases.

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Complete the same process over the entire board. I leave the dark green flocking to put on at the same time as the final cabots sealer.

The penultimate step is to spray vanish the roads with a flat varnish to dull them down.

The final stage is to paint the flocked areas with the cabots polyurethane arnish and the board is finished.

 

The finished product:

I will now start on  the small village buildings which I had already put together for another project.