Quick
Easy Roads
The
bane of my gaming existence is terrain making. I enjoy having highly
detailed, realistic items on the board, but when I start building
them I soon lose interest due to the length of time they take to
build. I've wanted some decent city streets and roads for my games
for a while. I decided that that I'll eventually build fully detailed
modular boards. In the interim what do I do for the game in a day or
two? My solution was to build some serviceable road sections as
quickly and cheaply as possible. Here's the result when added to the
game table.
The
following is a tutorial on how I made my quick and dirty roads. I
hope it provides some inspiration and simple instruction to those who
want to make something similar.
Gathering
the Materials
The
first step I took was to take a look around my studio and see what
materials I had on hand. Using items that were already available made
the project essentially free. The cost of the materials if I were to
purchase them again would be less than $20 for 30 to 50 feet of
roadway in 15mm scale. The time involved to make this first set was
around 4 hours including decision making and trial and error on a few
test parts. I ended up with about 10 feet of roadway. Back to the
materials.
Materials
and Tools:
Black
Fun Foam: I had 12” x 18” sheets on hand. Actual dimensions are
slightly less than that so there was a good bit of left over
material that wasn't wide enough or long enough for the road
sections I wanted. They were used as test pieces and will be used
in other projects like sidewalks later.
White
Paint: I actually chose an off-white. The actual color and brand of
paint is a matter of personal choice. The paint on hand was Folk
Art – Tapioca. Yellow would be a good additional color for
different road styles. I kept this first set simple.
Weathering
Powder: I had some Vallejo – Concrete here. You can use whatever
brand or even chalk pastels. I wanted a light gray to mute the road
surface when I was done.
Platinum
Gray Primer: It's not shown in the picture. I used a cheap, sandable
automotive primer.
Tools:
Steel ruler, 1/4” flat, #1 and #2 round brushes, X-acto knife, ball
point pen and pencil.
Design
Designing
the pieces was the most time consuming part of the project. I wanted
roads that were scaled for 15mm gaming. I chose to go with a 3”
width. That's slightly over scale for a 22 foot wide road, but most
of my vehicles are slightly larger than 1/100 scale and I figured a
little extra room to move figures wouldn't hurt. I arbitrarily chose
9” and 6” lengths. That ended up providing me with a good bit of
flexibility when laying out my first town. The intersections,
corners, and curves will all be based on 6”x 6”, 9”x6” or
9”x9” rectangles.
These
techniques will work for whatever scale you happen to want to play.
You'll need to adjust the road widths and/ or lengths to meet your
specific needs.
I
used two sheets of Fun Foam and decided to lay out 1 T-intersection,
1 intersection, 2 6” lengths and 4 9” lengths. I marked the
measurements with a pencil and cut them out with the knife.
I
experimented with different painting techniques on a couple of scrap
pieces and found that the fastest way to get good coverage was to
simply apply a light coat of primer over the parts. I allowed some of
the black to show through.
Using
the #2 brush, I lined the edges of the roads. I free-handed them, but
you could just as easily line a straight edge along the side and
paint them that way.
At
first I painted the center lines by drawing them on in pencil and
painting over the lines with the #1 brush. But then it hit me that I
could just line up the straight edge and paint them them to the
lengths I wanted without the extra step. I didn't do any real
research on line lengths or spacing for this set. The goal was speed,
not accuracy. I'll take some time to get measurements for the next
sets. For now, I have the impression of roads with dotted lines.
You
could stop at this point and have perfectly serviceable terrain. I
wanted more wear. So I added some cracks and small potholes. You can
get as crazy with this as you like. These were drawn on with a ball
point pen.
The
last touch I added was to apply the weathering powder. I used my
fingers to dab on blotches and then smoothed it out with the 1/4”
brush. I brushed parallel to the lines for the most part, but I also
brushed down into the cracks to mute them a bit.
Here
are a few shots of all of the pieces. Total time spent was about 4
hours.
The
work flow on the next few sets should be a little more streamlined.
I'll be adding more straights, some different sized intersections,
different line styles and some curves.
