Ancient ships finished and a few islands added

Slesel Haziran 24, 2022

Yesterday I was able to finish off the last few ancient ships. I will be needing to add a few islands and coastline to make the games a bit more interesting, besides which many of the naval battles were fought close to the coast.

The tabletop setup with the newly created islands and coastline, and recently completed ships.

After I considered a few option on how to creating the islands and coastline I settled on using foam/sponge sheet which I had used for packing the last time we moved. It is nice and light and can be throw in with other terrain without any worry of damage.

Here are the steps I used to create some foam islands and coastline.

Step 1 - Using a pair of scissors I cut out the pieces, shaped the coastline, and finally cut out gullies to make the coastline look quite rugged.

Foam is cut and shaped

Step 2 - I made up a large batch of brown wash using cheap acrylic paint from the kids section of the art shop. This was liberally applied to the foam pieces, then they were squeezed out to rid them of as much surplus wash as possible.

Step 3 - While the brown stained foam pieces were still damp I brushed on a light sand colour, working in the colour with the paint brush.

A comparison of a brown washed piece and one with the light sand brushed in.

Step 4 - Again before allowing time to try, a light grey paint was applied and worked in as with the sand colour.

A light grey is worked into the edges for cliffs and rocky areas.

Step 5 - A mid-green paint was applied, again nothing had been allowed to dry out, and the green was worked in on the top of the islands and coastline to represent vegetation. In all it only took 30 minutes to do all this using house paint in sample pots and cheap artist acrylics.

Green is added for vegetation

Step 6 - Once the terrain pieces are dry, then dry-brush the edges and terrain pieces to help highly the rugged coast. It can take quite a while to dry out, so finding somewhere warm will help speed up the process.

Once dry, the cliffs and coast is dry-brushed with a light sand colour

The final step is to set up the tabletop and play my first ancient naval game. All in all this terrain is simple, cheap, and no need to worry about it getting damaged when stored away.