Custom Steamroller Zone

With all the terrain I've been designing, I decided that a 6 inch by 12 inch steamroller zone would be great. Plus, it would give me a chance to use this new roller I recently picked up.

I first used a 50 millimeter base to draw a circle in the center of a plank of balsa, and I formed modeling clay into that circle as best I could. After it dried and hardened, I glued it into place. 

Next, I printed and cut out a Cygnus. I held it in place and painted all around it. That didn't work great. I had to do it a couple times to get the shape right. When I had the rough design in place, I had to do the rest by hand.

With the centerpiece in place, my plan was then to lay clay down all around it to the same thickness, approximately an eighth of an inch. After I'd done so, I hit it with the roller, creating a textured tile effect in the clay, which I then let dry.

The result wasn't as perfect as I'd hoped. My clay was thinner than expected, leaving a bit of a step up onto the disk at the zone's center. Even worse, the clay at the edges of the zone was peeling up and was ready to break off. I had to cut the edge of the clay off and glue on a border similar to what I'd done with my docks terrain piece.

I painted the balsa border black, and hit the entire terrain piece other than the disc at the center with black/grey paint, mostly to get the area between the tiles. Then I started painting the individual tiles varying shades of brown and grey. This was the most time-consuming part of the process.

 After the tiles were painted, there was still a small gap around the disc and at the edges near the wood border. I put down some white school glue there with a toothpick, and smeared dirt from my yard into the glue. Figuring that the dirt wouldn't hold with just glue, I then sprayed the entire piece with a clear spray lacquer, layering it extra thick atop the dirt.

From there, I was nearly done. I found that there were a few sections where the roller hadn't impressed the clay as deeply as others. Those areas looked a lot like puddles in the cobble street. So I played into that. I lay down "streams" of clear gel gloss in those areas, attempting to make my puddles. And while they didn't end up looking exactly as I'd imagined, the piece does look pretty good.

Here's my custom Cygnar zone.