Saturday 2 October 2021

Back to the Terrain Tiles

With the terrain tiles proof of concept a success, I ordered another 20 frames. Planned as a lockdown project I struck a delay when the courier delivered the parcel to the wrong address and then took a whole week to redeliver it, taking two weeks off my project time. Then lockdown was extended.

From these 20 frames I planned to make ten river tiles, five plain and five plain with roads. The river tiles required a change to the frame design with an indent for the river centered on the edge with 45 degree angles so that the entry point would line up across the tiles.

I took a day’s leave last Friday to have good three day run at this (and to get away from the computer screen), but sadly at 8:30 AM the texts and phone calls from work and I lost half the day. Nonetheless over the weekend I managed to complete four river tiles:

  • A straight section with eroded banks

  • A ford

  • A bend 

  • A fork

And four plain tiles:

  • One with a small depression in the centre

  • One with a some fields descending into a depression.

  • One with a road running across diagonally 

  • One with a curved road and a depression either side of the road.

Another three tiles will be worked on this weekend - the sixth in our current lockdown - although the completion of the remaining river tiles may be delayed because my supply of the gloss paste I use for the water effect is almost exhausted.



14 comments:

  1. The tiles look great Mark - I hope it wasnt NZC who mis delivered your parcel! I have been buying a few Trade Me items and they have been taking a week or longer to get here on CP!

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    1. No it was some crowd I’d never heard of. We had an urgent shipment at work that took nine days from Wellington. I see that the US Postal Service has suspended deliveries to NZ.

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  2. The tiles are very nice, the river sections s/b very useful as well as good looking.

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    1. Thanks. I am working on two more river sections this weekend, one of which is proving to y r quite a challenge.

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  3. Those look great Mark and look forward to seeing them all together with some figures and other terrain on them. The whole should look very impressive!

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    1. Thanks Steve. This is going to be a bit of a long project. I need around 65-70 tiles all up and I envisage working on maybe three or four a week.

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  4. I love the textures that are going into these tiles.

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    1. Thanks Norm. One of the pleasures of a project like this is to play with texture. Most of the texture here is created by the use of sand and toilet tissue that has been made into papier-mâché by mixing thinned PVA with it (which covers a multi of sins and is more forgiving to handling and less prone to chipping than polyfillers). I still have a bit of toning work to do on these so that they blend more readily with the other tiles and the beauty of thus project in that I can potter way on it while working on other projects.

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  5. Great work Mark, you have really mastered the art. Seventy tiles is going to be a big project. I am resigned to the fact that whenever I take annual leave staff will still ring my mobile number because they haven't checked the centralised diary. The conversation usually starts off with"sorry, I didn't realise you were taking a day off, but while I've got you..."

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    1. If I really got stuck into it I could probably finish them in a month, but storage is likely to become an issue if I don’t pace myself.

      Mine interruption was “sorry to disturb your day off but…”. Still I was able to finish a few hours earlier on the Monday to compensate.

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  6. These have worked really well Mark…
    I do like how the frame system works… if I every re do my terrain I may well try it…

    All the best. Aly

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    1. Yes I am really pleased with the way it is working. The frames do a really good job at protecting the edges. There is also the possibility of joining frames together to create a larger footprint.

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  7. Good looking and very smart terrain tiles,I often get,"didn't know you were off,anyway..."!
    Best Iain

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    1. Thanks Iain, I am really enjoying these tiles and have three more nearing completion.

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