My first display board

I wanted to make a display board for the club tournament because it was my first one with this club. I thought it would ingratiate me with some of the old hands and I also wanted to make some commitment to encourage myself to keep going. I also figured a display board was my best bet for actually walking away with some prize (which turned out to be true). This post is about the making of said board, with pictures!

Now I've never made a display board before, or terrain really, certainly not a gaming table. So I wanted something simple. My guys have a death theme going on. They are called 'Ghosts', they have white face paint on old armour, their bikers and jump infantry are called 'crows' with black armour riding tombstones, and all their vehicles are black. So I thought I'd do a graveyard. They're pretty simple and there is lots of ready made stuff available for use.

I decided on two things. I was going to use the Garden of Moor kit to get some basic buildings and the Citadel wood to get some gnarly trees (I also managed to get some extra tombstones from a Croatian group called tabletop world, who are great). And I was going to do a big cobblestone road through the middle for the bikes to drive through. Easy enough.

I spent some time thinking about what to mount the thing on. I was originally going to put it on the flip side of a whiteboard, but I wanted to be able to use it as a standalone piece of terrain and a whiteboard would be too tall for that. I settled on individual pieces of corkboard. They would bend in the long run but not too much, and they would make it easy to transport the thing and use it as 6 pieces of terrain. I could place the cork pieces on the whiteboard when I needed to move it as a mass.

After some initial blueprints I started placing stuff on the boards to get an idea of where things would go.

This stepped up a notch once I had the trees and extra tombstones

Then it was on to making the cobblestones. It was surprisingly easy, though maybe that was because my girlfriend was helping me out. You can get clay at hardware stores that dries at room temperature. You simply smooth it over the area (maybe 2mm thin) you want to have as the road. Let it dry a tiny bit (you use quite a lot of water to move it around and it gets quite soggy), and then use a modelling knife to cut the tiles in. You can see the pattern on the picture, but there is a great tutorial here. Once that's done you just leave it to dry somewhere warm overnight. The cracks and ridges that emerge give you great texture for drybrushing over.

I sprayed the cobblestones a black base-coat and the rest of the board brown. You can see in the picture above that I added a path at the front of the board with basing medium (i.e. grainy sand). I would have preferred more cobblestone but I'd run out of clay and it wasn't a bad look having the naturally formed path. To paint up the stones, drybrush them Adeptus battlegrey, then codex grey, then very lightly with fortress grey. You can even go white but then you have to wash it down black afterwards and I 1) couldn't be bothered 2) didn't want to use that much black ink.

The next step was to put down all the pieces, which we had painted beforehand (roses took for-evAR!). My girlfriend insisted I use blue tack in case I wanted to change things later or use the pieces for other projects. Not likely, but don't argue with you partner unless it's something really important, especially if they're helping you with Warhammer!

I planned the board a bit before hand in terms of where I was going to deploy the troops. I think this is pretty critical, especially if you don't have a board that is friendly to deployment like this one. If you're going to have hills, trenches and other wobbly bits, make sure you do some blueprints. I did a lot of planning on my white board, which was great because it was the same size as the finished project.

I figured I'd have most of the big buildings towards the back, the trees at the end of paths and the stones towards the front for poor people graves. Once the pieces were down we added some slate to the grave-beds to make them pop more, and little tufts of grass and moss about the place, especially on the edge of stones and in cracks on the road.

The final thing was to flock the thing. I had originally planned to flock about 90% of the 'mud', but after doing about 60% my girlfriend thought that was enough. Maybe she was tired (it was nearly midnight), maybe she genuinely thought that. In any case, that's how it went because of what I said above. I was indifferent, and it looked good. It would have been risky to go further and potentially make it look bad and not be able to backtrack.

And then it was done! I leave you with some pictures we took the next day outside where the thing look almost like a real graveyard (if you ignore the giant people and trees in the background). Comment if you have any questions.