D&D Dungeon Tiles (Pt. 7): I thought we were doing a Dirt road . . .

 This set gave me fits. Originally, I had planned to make the frame something like a grassy field with a dirt road cutting through it. 

Unfortunately, this was not to be.

 I wasn’t sure how to do the tree-line / forest edge on top of the 

embankment since I was trying to keep each set as flat as possible, 

so I started with the Dirt Road Tile.

 

(Not sure what I’m talking about? 

Check out my D&D Tile series from the beginning. I’ll wait.)

 

My first attempt, I tried covering the tile with a single layer of foam, intending to press wheel tracks into the surface. Unfortunately, the trays don’t give enough flat foam to cover the entire tile in a solid piece. 

This left me with seamlines that I attempted to cover. 

I realized that the sand I had was far too coarse to mimic a packed dirt road and trying to cover the seam lines with is just made the 

whole thing look like a dirty plywood subfloor. 

Not the look I was going for.

I ripped off the foam and watched a bunch of YouTube DIY terrain videos 

(like this one). Outside of getting me hooked on watching resin diorama vids, I also realized that the contents of tea bags could make pretty decent groundcover and look like forest loam and debris after painting. 

This time I didn’t bother with the foam layer and started gluing straight to the bare side of the cake board. I started off painting a layer of mod podge and pouring the tea onto the tile, but it didn’t adhere as well as I wanted. I tried adding more mod podge on top, but since I didn’t remember to thin it 

with water, it was too thick and I had to add more tea. 

I realized that my best option was to do what I had with the sand and mix the tea into a small pool of mod podge and using my brush to scoop it onto the tile. I added more of the quartz rock scatter in small outcroppings in a few places to break things up. I even used the metal edge of 

a wax seal to press grooves into the tea.

 

This is the look I was going for when I painted . . .

It came out like this . . .

It was not quite what I’d hoped for. But when I showed it to Elroy, he thought it would make a good cave floor if I gave it a grey wash.
 
And so, a new concept for this set was born . . .  I would make the frame into a cave.
 
 
 

Next up: Creating the Cave Frame