The 25mm Warrior

I got to admit I'm in a bit of a painting rut. My Guard army looks daunting and since I can do any army I want I tend to want to do all of em. Right now I'm just sitting on Guard, Orks, Eldar and Space Marines and it feels like the sheer numbers are sucking the drive to paint right out of me.

So I'm gonna paint some terrain, bide my time while I figure out what to do.

And man... do I have a lot of terrain too.

I bought the Zuzzy Textured Terrain Game Mat a bit ago. Zuzzy had some flubs with their shipping so I got a free 11x14 inch mat along with my 4x6 game mat. In retrospect I'm glad they screwed up the ordering because the good peeps at Zuzzy provided me with a small piece of the larger whole as a way of an apology. Thats just perfect for testing the paint scheme out.

I'm kicking myself that I didn't order that myself.


So I got everything laid out here. The mat I chose was the "The Ruined Land." Just looking at this mat is a bit intimidating as well. The mat is covered with multiple sections of cracked mud, broken trees, rocks and something that looks like mulch on top of the mass broken ground that covers the majority of the mat.

How the hell am I supposed to paint all that and make it look good?

I jetted over to a local art/ craft shop for some acrylic paint. Since I wanted this thing to look like a ripped up battlefield (kinda like the fields of WWI) I decided to really keep to strong earth tones. Brown highlighted with a lighter brown followed up with an even lighter brush of Bleached Bone seemed like a good idea.


I started slopping on brown...

Then I ran into a problem.

What was I gonna paint the mulch like sections?

Crap.

With nothing left to do I just took the brown and mixed it with the dark gray one to one and hoped.

Ok, ok... not bad. At this point I'm not really sure about this choice. Thanks Zuzzy for the screw around mat :)

Next I picked out the rocks with gray to give a bit of contrast.

Then I grabbed some Bubonic Brown for the trees. I'm not even sure why I have Bubonic Brown to tell you the truth.

Ack! Too yellow. Now I'm really starting to doubt myself. I only got one shot to get it close to right here. I'm gonna be bummed if I mess up my 80 dollar game mat.

Nothing left to do but drybrush that light brown I got...

And thats when it all came together.

Wow! What a difference drybrushing makes! I spent some extra time trying to blend in the broken ground sections with the mulch whatever that stuff is sections.

In the end I got this...


The absolute amazing thing here was this only took about 30 minutes to do. I figure a couple of days painting time and the full game mat should be done.

And after this I'm excited to paint it.

This mat is awesome! Once the ground is painted it really does look like the kind of battlefield we all dream of playing on. Zuzzy is a good company too and I really appreciate their willingness to acknowledge an oops and kick something down to the customer as a "hey sorry bro" gesture.

If you want a cool mat that paints up fast and you don't have to be some expert painter or model builder to get it then Zuzzy is an excellent choice.

Thanks again Zuzzy!