A portable Portable Wargame board ... has now been painted!

I could not resist experimenting with painting the smaller of the two boards I had acquired from Warbases. Whilst the result was not 100% successful, I learnt some very useful lessons which will help me to ensure that the larger board will be painted to a much better standard.

The method that I used is as follows:

Step 1
I clipped the four pieces together to form a single board. I then used ordinary sticky tape to mask off the outer edge. (Lesson learnt: I should have used proper masking tape as the sticky tape did not react well with the surface of the MDF and roughened it up when it was removed.)

Step 2
Using thinned Humbrol Matt Grass Green enamel paint, I painted the unmasked surface of the board using a flat paintbrush. This had the effect of staining rather than painting the surface. (Lesson learnt: I painted the boards in one direction, with the result that when the paint dried, the direction of the brush strokes was visible. I'll not do that again!)

Step 3
I turned the board through ninety degrees, and gave the board a second coat of thinned paint. This went some way to reducing the visibility of the brush strokes produced by the first coat. (Lesson learnt: As the second layer of paint was drying, I dabbed a small sponge over the wet surface. This seemed to produce a mottled effect in places, and in future I'll apply the thinned paint using a sponge and not a brush.)

Step 4
When the paint was thoroughly dry, I removed the sticky tape (see above) and used proper masking tape to mask off the painted part of the board from the outer edge. I then painted the outer edge using Humbrol Matt Black.

The finished Portable Wargame board looked like this:

Although the etched-in grid lines are not very visible when seen from a distance, close to they are ... which is what I hoped would happen.

I'm now thinking about painting the larger of my two boards, and when I do so, I'll certainly use what I have learnt to ensure that I end up with a board that is painted to a much better standard. In the meantime, I'm just going to see what the painted board looks like with a few figures marching across it ...

Some 15mm-scale Peter Laing 1870 Prussian Infantry on my newly-painted Portable Wargame board.

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For those of you who might have missed my very short blog entry about the availability of the larger size of four-piece board, Warbases have now included it in their catalogue.