Making of: Citadel Realm of Battle Board

Hello chaps!

Between my current Tyranids project, my lil‘ kid and tons of garden work I‘m working on my old Realm of Battle board.

I bought and painted the board two years ago and the look of it always bugged me a bit as the paintjob just wasn‘t adequate for a 200 Euro plastic board. 

Now the whole thing will be covered with a PVA+sand mixture and all terrain pieces will be integrated into the look of the ground surface. 

I already finished the first two squares and I‘m currently working on some additional terrain for the other pieces.

The board will consist of the following parts:

- Skyshield with tank repair station and bunker

- battlefield with craters, lots of low cover and a wrecked imperial basilisk (finished)

- Two squares with civil buildings (one finished)

- A huge scratchbuild highway bridge

- Craters with a generic building

With this setup I have two dense terrain pieces (skyshield/battlefield), two medium ones (civil buildings) and two pieces with very few terrain (bridge/generic building). In addition the huge terrain pieces were placed at the edges of the board so I can easily switch from dense terrain to an open battlefield by just turning some squares. Variety ftw!

Most of the terrain pieces are already painted and glued on the board, I only have to finish the skyshield bunker and the bridge. This will be my first adventure to plasticard and I‘m pretty curious about it. I already made some drawings and measurements, bought some different plasticard pieces and will start working on it tomorrow.

To finish my first post here‘s a small step-by-step guide:

- Paint your terrain pieces before adding them to the board

- Fix the terrain with PVA glue

- Mix PVA glue and siliceous sand (around 50:50 I‘d guess)

- Get dirty! Smear the mixture on the board using a flat piece of plastic, for tricky parts I used my wet fingers for it

- Let it dry for while until it starts to get sticky

- Rough the surface with some flat piece of plastic (if its still too wet the rough surface will get smooth again within minutes, just wait a little more and repeat the process but don‘t wait until the upper layer gets completely dry!!)

- Stick some bits into the sand mixture

- Wait 24h

- Paint the board with an airbrush using 4 different colours (black/dark brown/medium brown/bleached bone)

- Highlight the surface with skull white

- Stick some army painter tuft to some random places

- finished!