New from old (Part 2)
In my previous blog I talked about refurbishing old terrain boards I made some eight years ago and putting them to good use. The mixture of paint and PVA glue is a useful as it has made the boards just that little bit tougher. They’ll need to stand up to the wear and tear of travel and of course Salute itself. Hopefully these newly revamped boards will see use for many years to come.
Last time I discussed how disaster was averted and my ‘moonscape’ boards were turned into more ‘down-to-earth’ looking terrain with some Woodland Scenics Earth undercoat. We’d painted the boards with a standard DIY paintbrush and a groundsheet underneath (you don’t want mud coloured floors). We also removed any excess from the edges of the board which could prevent them fitting together. Next comes the flocking.
The aim was to create a natural looking board, so we liberally mixed the various shades of static grass. 
I used a mixture of grades of static grass (mainly 4mm spring and summer mix) and a static grass applicator (the Pro Grass 1.0 from War World Scenics). I started with ‘Spring Mix’ for the edges (so all the boards would match up) with some patches of ‘Summer Mix’ in patches. After a while I had a sore arm from all that static grass shaking and time was going against me. With more time, I would have created a gentle change form one grass texture to the other - although to be honest, we’d tried a subtle delineation in colour with the grasses for our Salute game last year and nobody noticed! Again with more time I’d have added in some patches of off colour grass but I was happy with the result. Using static grass looks much better than my previous efforts all those years ago.
Finally I used ‘Woodland Scenics Realistic Water’ for the streams. It looked great at first but the effect wasn’t quite as awe inspiring once it had dried. I think that I should have (with more time) added the river in layers. Adding it all at once is not a good idea as I’ve found, as the effect can take days to dry. Last year it wasn’t quite dry for Salute and a child left its fingerprints in the river!
