Making a wargaming board part 2

The MDF boards have all been framed which took the warpage out a treat.  Edging has been added to provide a small lip above the table surface to  prevent things like dice getting knocked off the table.  All the edges butt up nice and tight.  So far so good.  Next comes the painting of the surface.

Although I intend to use a cloth much of the time a coat of paint does two things, firstly it seals the MDF, which if I'd thought to do in the first place would probably prevented the warping.  Secondly it provides a base colour in case a cloth doesn't cover everything or I just want to get troops on a table with the minimum of setting up fuss.  So it was off the B&Q for some green paint, but which shade of green?

Green is a tricky colour to get right.  As its the predominant colour in our natural environment our eyes have evolved to distinguish really subtle differences in green's tone and shade. I settled on a shade made by Valspar called 'Absinthe Dreams' which is one of those shades that the store mixes for customers on the spot.  It's a good match for a generic grass green.  Now comes the bad news; its paint so it is all one shade, 'cos paint's like that.  Real world ground cover isn't all one shade, cos the real world is like that and the two don't really match up.  Having a table top all one shade of green simply doesn't look right.  It needs breaking up which I suppose is why many people use flock over terrain boards.

Look at the variation in shades of green in this photo of Cumbria from the BBC

The problem is made worse by the helicopter general effect.  By that I mean that when we look at our game tables we are looking down as if we were hovering over the battlefield.  We see what pretends to be a large chunk of landscape from a long distance (based on the scale of the terrain) which means we expect to see variation in the vegetation, pretty much as shown above.  Now my board looks like this after one coat of paint.

I have created a board of purest green, but it's not much like the photo above is it? 

I'm going to give it a second coat and then put it up as a three section 6' x 4' board and try out the look with some scatter terrain before I start trying to break up the green.  There are still a couple of things to do.  In no particular order I need to paint the sides which I will probably do in a pale grey and I need to drill holes through the frame to allow the sections to be bolted together.  I will probably do that tomorrow.

By the way Chez Elenderil doesn't normally look as messy as it does in the above photo!  This is the scene at the end of week four of building work to convert what was originally an outside toilet and a store room into a shower room. The rooms now open into the conservatory rather than the garden and for the last month the builders have been cutting and sawing, plastering, digging up concrete floors , drilling through brick walls and other Bob the builder style stuff, all of which makes dust and mess.  And that is my excuse, honest.