Crafting challenge, week 3

For this week I had to solve a problem.  I knew there was a big street fight about to happen and while I have plenty of buildings, I didn't think my dungeon tiles looked good with them.  These are the cobblestone tiles I made.

These are built to be modular with my other tiles so they're the same 2" grid and built up with the same cardboard lock scheme.  As an added bonus, I got to use up a bunch of the scrap chipboard I've got laying around.  I knew I kept that stuff around for a reason.  These are 1/4" thick to match the double thickness cardboard that make up the other tiles and they're textured with the same Green Stuff World pavement roller I use on other builds.  I think I might switch to Readi-Board for future tiles because I think it's easier to texture with rolling pins even if it's slightly thinner than I'd like.

For anyone interested in purchasing these for your own usage, be aware that there are different scales of rolling pins sometimes with different textures and the same name.  I don't know why they do this but it's awfully confusing.  

I did the texturing, priming (with ye old Mod Podge and black paint) and painting before mounting the cardboard lock mechanism so that nothing would gum up the locking slots.  I cheated and airbrushed these which is, IMO, a unique kind of hell when working with such light objects.  The normal wash I use for just about everything else finished the painting part at which point everything got glued as normal.  I worried a lot that the weight required to glue properly would damage the texturing but that turned out not to be a problem.  To finish, I hit them with a couple coats of matte finish. 

If I had to make my dungeon tiles over again (and I might) I think I'd make them a lot like this.  We used to use the walled tiles pretty often but it's kind of fallen out of favor for no particular reason.  These are easier to make, have better texturing (in general) are easier to paint, are easier to store and IMO have a lot more character.  A good palette of scatter terrain feels sufficient to do most of the stuff we care about.

I also painted two miniatures!  These are Fulumbar Ironhand and Dain Deepaxe both from Reaper Bones.  These are also player characters, one right now and the other possibly in the future.  I took these to a slightly higher standard than normal but as I've said before:  I'm not a good painter.  I experimented quite a lot with these guys since they were so detailed.  I'm starting to think that outside of practicing technique that mini quality is directly related to the amount of time and effort spent.  I'll be experimenting with that in the future.

2019 finished mini counter:  34/100.