H.O.W. TO / WIP: Citadel Realm of Battle Gameboard Pt2

Part two of our how-to series, in which we cover dry brushing and painting the rocky portions of the boards.

If you haven't seen it, Part 1 of our tutorial can be found here. We covered the basics of cleaning, spray painting and then base coating our boards. In today's post, we'll talk about dry brushing, and painting the rocky areas of the tiles.

At the end of the first phase, our boards looked like this:

After applying a series of heavily watered down layers, the paint formed into swirls that mimicked natural formations. The effect is solid, but much of the sculptural details were lost. A close look at the board reveals thousands of bumps meant to give the surface texture. We can bring these back out by using a large brush, and dry brushing the surface.

Use a combination of your brown with a healthy dose of white to make a highlight color. As with all dry brushing, be sure to wipe your brush thoroughly on a cloth or paper towel to remove most of the paint. Then, lightly and quickly whisk the tip of the brush over the surface repeatedly. If you are doing it correctly, the raised surfaces will start to appear only after several passes. The completed result will look like this:

Notice that the swirls and variations in the overall paint scheme remain, but the surface details now pop, adding a layer of visual interest to the board.

Moving on to the stone areas of the boards, we can apply a simple, three layered technique. After completing our first stage, the flat tile with stones looked like this:

The stone areas are largly untouched, so now we need to apply a series of layers to bring out the recesses and highlights. The first step is to add a dark wash. Using black or very dark grey, apply a wash over the stone area, allowing it to creep into all the cracks and recesses. When it dries, it should look like this:

Next, we apply a series of dry brush layers. This works in the same way as the larger, brown areas of the board, only we are going to use progressively lighter and lighter shades of grey. After applying a dry brush layer of medium grey, and then a layer of light grey, your board will look like this:

Here's a closer look at the area. Note that the dark recesses remain, and the sculptural details of the stones have been accentuated by the multiple, lighter dry brushing layers. It's a big difference from where we started!

Now, using this simple technique, you can complete all the stony areas of your tiles. Apply a dark wash to the recesses, dry brush a medium grey, then dry brush a light grey. When you've completed the steps, your rocky areas will look like this:

That's it for stage two. Simple, right? In stage three, we'll cover how to get rid of those crappy skull pits that GW likes to put everywhere, and the application of static grass to add a final touch.

Questions? Comments? Be sure to join the discussion below.

-trip