Stalinboard Update - Done!

I finished the Stalingrad board last Sunday after a trip to visit Timmy and get some stuff from the shop. I took some snaps of it today after everything had dried. Here they are, with a quick description of how it all came together.


Here are the finished boards - taken from the deck above so I could get them all in the shot. That's the square in the center. To the left will be the railroad yard. If the board were to continue to the right for another foot or so, you would run into the Volga. The boards have been textured with lightweight spackle. I was originally going to use Golden textured media for it, but that would have cost me $100 (at least) to texture the entire board. The spackle is harder to work with, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper ($12 for the whole board) and it is super light when dry. The downsides are that it is more fragile than the media and I have never been able to successfully mix the paint into the spackle, so it has to be painted afterwards. This means you will have some white spots if it chips. Of course, the cure for that is to take good care of it. It's the same thing I've done to make woods for years now, and it hasn't let me down yet.

By the way, the green bits are Golden coarse textured gel, with some cheap green acrylic paint mixed in. I am now putting this on my miniature bases (along with some smooth textured gel with an earth-tone paint), and am very happy with the results. It's much more economically feasible on miniatures than on entire wargaming layouts, that's for sure!


Here's a view with the three buildings I've gotten from Battleworks Studios (those guys are AWESOME!). I commissioned them to make seven total buildings, specifically for Stalingrad. Combined with my current collection, that will give us a lot of options for this battlefield.

Texturing was the biggest pain of the whole process for sure. The painting went very quickly. I don't think it took 90 minutes to paint the entire thing, not including waiting for the first coat to dry. (I didn't wait for the dry brushing coats to dry as it helps the colors to blend better if you add subsequent coats while the previous one is still a bit wet.)

We'll use this battlefield to play out the Pavlov's House series of battles from the Stalingrad campaign, and for some 15mm sci-fi fun too. It will make a great "thrashed" cityscape for futuristic tanks, mechs and infantry to slog through. I am hoping to have those figures off to the good folks at Fernando Enterprises in the next week or two, so we can hopefully be playing - IN SPACE! - by next spring.

Cheers!

- Rod