Make your own Battle mat for your Scifi Skirmish Wargames.

About this video

• Video Title: Make your own Battle mat for your Scifi Skirmish Wargames.
• Channel: Berserkerworks
• Speakers: None explicitly named.
• Duration: 00:09:57

Overview

This video tutorial demonstrates how to create a custom urban-themed battle mat for science fiction skirmish wargames. It covers the process from preparing the canvas base to texturing, painting, and finally cutting the mat to the desired size.

Key takeaways

• Material Preparation: Start with a canvas drop cloth, iron out creases, and secure it to a larger board for stability.
• Texture Application: Mix acrylic caulk with isopropyl alcohol, PVA glue, and sand to create a concrete-like texture. This mixture is spread evenly over the canvas.
• Texturing Techniques: Various tools like foam spreaders and textured rollers (used with isopropyl alcohol to prevent sticking) can be employed to create different surface effects. The texture can be smoothed or enhanced as desired.
• Painting Process: Use a combination of spray paints (blacks, browns, blues) to build up base colors and shadows. Stencils can be used for details like road markings or graffiti, followed by blending with spray paint.
• Adding Depth and Realism: A black wash made from water, ink, and paint can be applied to simulate dirt and grime, with splatters creating puddle effects. Dry brushing with lighter colors highlights details and textures.
• Sealing and Cutting: Once dry, the mat should be sealed with a matte acrylic sealant. Finally, the mat is cut to the desired dimensions, ensuring squareness for accuracy in gameplay.

Hey everyone, how's it going? Today I want to show you how to make your own urban battle map. So you're gonna need some canvas drop cloths, some acrylic caulk, some craft paint, some PVA glue, sand, isopropyl alcohol, and some sort of tool to spread everything outward. So start out by unpacking your canvas, lay it out on the table, and figure out what size you want to cut. If you got an iron, you can use that now to get some of the creases out, it'll make everything look better later. I'm gonna be making a 3x3, three foot by three foot table and I've got this piece of plywood here which is cut at about three and a half feet by three and a half feet and that's just so I've got a little bit of extra room to play with and I'll go ahead and staple that down, get it nice and secure. Try to take out some more of the wrinkles if you can. You don't have a stapler, just use some tape. There we go, ready for texture. Go ahead, get yourself a container, decant out your acrylic caulk. I think I use two and a half tubes for this project and it doesn't really matter what color your caulk is, we're gonna be adding paint to it later. Nice neutral color is good. Add a little bit of isopropyl alcohol. The reason you do this is to dilute the the caulk down a bit, thin it out, which will help it spread out and it'll also make your material go a bit further. So now that it's in black paint and some sand. Didn't make it into the footage, but I added a little bit of PVA glue to it this as well and then just go ahead and stir that up. So once you got it mixed up, get yourself a scrap of canvas and try out your mixer. It's a good idea to test these out before you go to your main project, just cuz then if you need to add more sand, you can do it here. And that looks pretty good, that's what I'm going for. So now you just need to spread it all out. You just want to get a nice even coat, try to hide the the texture that you get from the threads of the canvas itself. And you can kind of thin this out, move it around. This piece of foam has been rounded out a little bit and that's had a quick dip in some isopropyl alcohol to stop the caulk from sticking to it. So you just want to stipple some texture and just keep working on it until it looks the way you want. You can always knock this down a little bit later, which is exactly what I did here. I wasn't happy with how grainy and rough it looked, so I smooth down everything out again. We're going for a concrete look, so it shouldn't be too rough. What's great with the caulk is you can use textured rollers like this, just get them wet with some isopropyl alcohol so the acrylic doesn't stick to them, roll them out, and then just blend it all in with a sponge. You can do all kinds of effects with this, you can do cobblestone, whatever texture roller you've got, you can use it. Just remember to use lots of isopropyl alcohol to keep it clean and stop things from sticking. Now just go ahead, blend it all in with a bit of texture, smooth some areas out until you're happy with it, and then all you gotta do is let it dry. [Music] Okay, this has had all night to dry, it's all good to go, ready to start painting. I'm just using an assortment of aerosol cans I can get here locally. You want some blacks, and browns, and blues, you know, whatever colors you want your mat to be. And then just go ahead and start spraying those on, moving the colors around, experimenting until you're happy with it. And don't forget that when you've built up your light colors, you can go back in with your dark colors again and create some shadows and some depth. Now here I've got some stencils. I found these on ArtStation, I think it was. They're just in a Deko pack and I printed them out on matte printer paper or satin printer paper, cut the shapes out, and then started laying them out on the table. And these are just generic sci-fi, so you can use paintbrushes, sponges, whatever you want to get your paint on there. And you don't have to be super neat either. You could also, you know, rather than just traffic signs or shapes, you can do graffiti, whatever you wanted. And then once that's all on there, you want to blend it all in a little bit with your spray paint again, make everything look a bit old and worn rather than brand new. And once all that's tried, I came in with some some black wash that I made with water and ink and a little bit of black paint, and I'm splatting that in and rubbing it around to get some of that kind of old oil and dirt and things that have collected on the roads. And then I also just splattered some of it in in puddles and let that dry. If you're impatient, you can also use a hairdryer. And then I went in again and just touched up some of the areas, making a little bit darker. Once all that's dried, you can start dry brushing and help pick out your details and try to show some of those areas where you used your texture rollers. Just work with a couple of different colors. This is like a light blue gray, it's very similar to one of the spray cans and then add just a little bit more white for your next dry brush highlight. I'm not trying to be even here, I'm just trying to get interesting shapes and colors and keeping it patchy so that there's some variety. And then you can just go in and pick out some small areas. Don't worry about your mistakes, most of this is gonna get covered in terrain. And so once all that's done and dry, go ahead and seal it with some sort of matte acrylic. So now you want to lay out for your cuts. Like I said earlier, this is a three by three table, so I'm laying out one line and then I'm marking a parallel line on the other side, three feet apart. And then you can take a square, square it off with the line that you've already made, find your three foot parallel lines again, mark those out. Just remember to try to keep everything square. This might not be a big deal for you and your friends, but if you get somebody who's into Mathammer or things like that, they might get upset if your mat's a little bit unsquare, but you probably shouldn't play with those people anyway. And then once all your lines are marked out, just go ahead and cut it out. [Music] [Music] And there you have it, your 3x3 urban cyberpunk sci-fi battle map. [Music] Well, there you go, guys. That's how you make your own battle mat. You can paint them however you like, texture them however you like, making was big and small as you want. It's a really, really versatile way of doing things. If you guys want more information, more detail on how to build these mats, the materials, canvas, all that kind of stuff, I highly recommend you check out TheTerrainTutor's videos. He's got at least two videos on how to do this and I'll leave a link in the description to that. So yeah, let me know what you guys think. If you want to see more of this in the future, let me know. And probably gonna have to build a whole bunch of cyberpunk terrain now to go with this mat. Hmm, yeah, guys, take care and I'll see you next time. You, I guess.