Collins builds the world of The Walking Dead

We now have enough for a battle report or two. Keep an eye out for another project coming soon!

I think I’m calling this board done at this point. It looks smart, has open areas that can be changed up for gameplay and lots of really interesting details.

For gameplay i’ll designate all the shrubs and stuff as flat ground, they are just there for my viewing pleasure, the trees however are there to slow walkers down as well as add interest.

I hope you’ve enjoyed watching this come together. I’ll be doing a batrep (or two) on it in the future. in the meantime, enjoy the show off artsy photo gallery.

All of this stuff was built/painted back in 2016/2017 when the game was in it’s early life. The most important thing to highlight in this is the turdis which is known in the community as ‘hobby bog 1’ as named by Warzan on an XLBS back in 2016… well, as you can see someone (not me) was inspired by Warren and made a Beasts of War Portaloo and posted on thingiverse for free! #flippingcool

The rest is either TTCombat or Mantic Games TWD scenery/objectives, all great stuff. bonus points for those that figure out the companies that the skips come from ‘in world’… the red skip was posted on twitter by a friend and the real person saw it and retweeted expressing how cool it was…sadly i cannot be bother to find the evidence, so you can either research it or disbelieve me haha.

On the note of skips, they come empty so what i did was fill them with cut up MDF sprue (from 4ground buildings…more on that another time 😉 ) and slapped a load of typhus corrosion paint in there for mud dirt and grime. the rolled up carpet was made from baby wipes dunked in a green wash and the excess drained off. all very simple but looks great as skips are never empty in the real world (except at the depot)

This entry is all about adding in the (previous) existence of humans. Mankind leaves behind it a trail of debris in terms of paper and plastic waste. an easy way for me to recreate this is to use the material produced and given away by people online (I can take no credit for this pdf).

I printed it off in black and white (I don’t have a colour printer unfortunately) and then tea stained it to age it and give the newspapers the unbleached off-white colour they normally have. for those that don’t know about tea staining, make a cup of tea, take the tea bag out before adding milk, and then drag it across the paper where you want it to go brown. the more passes you do the more brown it will stain the paper. very simple really.

To determine where the paper was going to go I did two things, firstly I added plastic to the big windows so it looks like there are actually windows, I drew cracks on using a permanent CD marker and then superglued on the missing posters.

The news papers were all cut up and placed on my hands and literally blown onto the board. where they landed is where they were glued with superglue. I did drop a load into the shop area so it kinda looked like they had fallen from the shelf but the key is randomness really which is why the blowing worked well on the outside spaces.

next up is to take this wonderfully technicolour world and turn it into black a white. enter a free app called Prisma and a filter called Heisenberg*.

its basically a one click way of turning photos into a graphic novel style extremely similar to the TWD comics.

*blue meth not part of the filter or additional in app purchases options

This step is all about breaking up and adding interest to the green areas, to do this I used 3 types of tuft that I (legit) happened to have in stock (I have a box of tufts and papercraft plants that I liked and picked up randomly)

Spikey Green (gamers grass)

wild (gamers grass)

moorland (games workshop no longer sold)

the GW ones I just stuck down  but the gamers grass ones needed a helping hand from some superglue

all the details are in these project entries

https://www.ontabletop.com/project-entry/1662344/

https://www.ontabletop.com/project-entry/1665216/

https://www.ontabletop.com/project-entry/1670470/

However, the gist of it is, add mod podge to the branches of your woodland scenic armatures, use a static grass applicator to add 12mm long static grass in your colour of choosing. then wait for it to dry. spray with spray glue (recommend good stuff like 3M) and add 2mm short static grass through an applicator. finally seal it all down with home made matt scenic sealant (water, ISO and matt medium).