My first display board

 I made my first ever display board for Armies on Parade this year. I really enjoyed making it and am very pleased with how it came out, so thought I'd write a short guide to how it did it. I found when I was researching that there were a lot of videos on making display boards and terrain, but not that many blogs, and personally I prefer written guides for this sort of thing.

Here's a picture of the finished board. I'm pleased with it because:

• it meets my initial vision for it, which was my Tempest Eye army marching through a canyon;
• and I think it looks like the models belong in that world, the board fits with their bases very well.

If I was doing it over again, the three things I'd try to do better are:

• take better photos - I really struggled with this;
• put the tree at the front - this is the bit of the board with the most detail (there are a lot of birds in and around the tree), but it gets a bit lost in the middle and was hard to bring out in photos;
• improve the look of the bits of the board not covered by hills (more on this below).

What materials did I use?

I didn't plan very well, and bought more stuff than I ending up using. Here's a list of what I actually used to make the board.

• A 4 foot by 2 foot thin hardwood sheet, which I cut in half and stuck one piece on top of the other. Ideally I'd have got a 2 by 2 thicker piece of mdf, but for logistical reasons I ended up having to make do.
• Polystyrene pieces cut off some packaging I had lying around.
• A tub of polyfilla.
• A can of expanding foam.
• Some small stones. 
• A 500ml pot of Modpodge (essentially PVA glue).
• A small resin tree from Dark Fantastic Mills.
• Some sand, ballast (small rocks), and moss from the model railway terrain section of my local hobby store.
• Superglue.
• Some cheap black and grey spray paint.
• Small amounts of various acrylic paints and washes I already had for mini painting purposes.

Planning

My concept was for the army to be marching through a canyon. The basing scheme for the army is meant to be the ashen steppes around Tempest's Eye, so it's largely grey rock with some green mossy bits. As this was my first display board I didn't want to do anything too complicated, so I decided to just do a hilly section on either side of the board, with a largely flat section in the middle for the minis to go on. Here's a picture of the board at the planning stage, when I'd marked out where the various units were going to go, and started creating the basic structure for the hills.

Building

The hills are largely made from polystyrene. I had some packaging lying around waiting to be taken to the tip, so I ripped chunks off that and stuck them together. I then used expanding foam to fill the larger gaps. If I were doing it over I'm not sure I would use expanding foam again - I found it tricky to stop it expanding more than I wanted it to, my cat was very keen to try to eat it for some reason, and I struggled to stop the nozzle on the can from getting clogged up. I'd probably figure most of these things out with more practice, but I think it would have been easier to use a combination of small pieces of polystyrene and polyfilla for gap filling.

Once the foam was dry, I then used large quantities of polyfilla to fill any remaining small gaps, and also add some texture and make it look more like rock and less like a load of foam.

I wanted to keep the non-hill sections pretty flat as that was where the minis would be going, but I stuck some stones and small pieces of polystyrene down to give it some variety. I then used a mix of model railway small rocks and sand to add further texture. The small rocks didn't work as well as I'd hoped - they look fine on the army's bases, but having so many similarly sized rocks looks a bit weird at board scale. If I were doing this again, I'd use patches of polyfilla to add texture to the flatter bits instead.

The final step was to cover all the foam generously with Modpodge (basically PVA glue), so that it wouldn't melt when I spraypainted it. This took ages - I was very paranoid about it melting, so I did a lot of coats! The key thing is to get to a stage when you can feel a hard, shiny coat of glue over all the foam.

Here's a picture of the board towards the end of the building stage (the grey bits are where I've applied Modpodge mixed with grey paint, to make it easier to see which bits I'd done).

Painting

I did a fairly quick and dirty paint job. I sprayed the whole board black, and then did a light spray of grey over the top. I added some patches of colour using various colours of washes, in
cluding green, brown, purple and red. I used a small amount of texture paints to add some texture in areas that still looked a bit too foam-like. Then I did a heavy drybrush of light grey, and a lighter drybrush of off-white. Finally I painted some heavier patches of the off-white colour onto the rougher parts of the hills, to try to give the sense of there being some different textures involved there. 

One thing I think I would do differently if I were doing it again is to use more texture paint, in particular I did a few small patches of crackle paint on the tops of the hills which worked very well at small scale, but wasn't very noticeable when looking at the whole board.

Finishing touches

I added some moss patches to the hills, again taking this as an opportunity to break up boring looking grey areas, and cover over any bits that lacked texture. I splodged brown wash all over the moss, to make it stand out less. I ended up not adding much moss apart from on the hills, because most of the model's bases have some moss pon, so I figured I wouldn't need it elsewhere on the board.

The last thing I did was paint up and stick on some plastic birds, in the area around the tree. The lore for my army is that they are led by a Stormcast who after many reforgings believes that she can speak to birds who bring her messages from Sigmar, so the birds are there to represent that aspect of the army. I'm not sure this really comes across to anyone else looking at the board, but it makes me happy which is the main thing!

Here's a picture of the finished board, with no minis on it. There are a few large flat bits without much texture, but that was intentional as I knew I was going to be adding several models with large bases.

What next?

I had a lot of fun making the board, and I definitely want to make another one for Armies on Parade next year. Most likely the next one I do will be a woodland scene for my ghost dwarf/Sylvaneth army, though I need to finish painting the army first.

At some point I might also do a photoshoot with this board for my Kharadron army, since they use the same basing scheme as my Tempest's Eye.