Realm of Battle Board: hit the chaos black respray button

I went on the Realm of Battle Masterclass several years ago, opting to go with a winter theme. While the initial paint job was grand; undercoat black, basecoat with The Fang, heavy drybrush with Baneblade Brown and a slightly less heavy drybrush of Mechanicus Standard Grey. Final hit of a circling drybrush, very lightly with Ceramite White. Boards looked fab and I couldn't have been happier.

My gut instinct was to ignore the next stage, take these back home and do the drifting snow effect back home, but with almost the whole afternoon left it was daub some pva glue onto the great looking boards and dump into a ready made foamex box. Sprinkled liberally with snow, you've no need to imagine how crap they ended up as there are plenty of photos below... always trust your gut instinct

I had a go at improving these last summer, why I feel the need to work on snowscapes in the middle of a heatwave, I know not? Then, I used a butter knife to get under the worst of the "mini hills" of glue and got a rough (NOT wire) scourer to get the worst of the snow off. The hills (images 1 and 2) have had this treatment, ok it knocked back the winter wonderland look, but still not enough. On image 13 you can see the gouge marks where I've gotten under the pva. Thoroughly disheartened, it's back in the bag they go.

Fed up with the finished look of these, I finally decided this weekend, enough is enough, and a quick tour of Google et al gave me the info I needed, spray WD40 onto the boards. This dissolves the glue and you can scrape what's left off and be back at the painted boards. That's the plan and I'll update you in a few days with how these turned out, but the plan is to remove all the snow and repaint if necessary, hopefully not. I'll sprinkle the scenic snow from above, to mimic nature, not sure yet but a straw or hairdryer to form the drifts. Watered down pva sprayed on to lock it all in place and I should end up with a rocky terrain with a light drifting snowfall, lots of drifts to the hills and snow in the cracks on the 'paths'. We'll see...

Below are the boards before I went into the garden and liberally coated them in WD40, results to follow.


















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