The Road

The concept for a terrain project began to congeal in my mind last week and I started gathering up the necessary elements. I thought the easiest ask would be a 3' straight length of contemporary asphalt road in 28mm. Any number of companies must offer such a product, right?

Well, maybe half right. There are some options out there but none that I found, er, harmonize quality and price. Nor did any of them match the image in my mind. So why not just make some road? After leaving the office last night, I stopped by HobbyLobby ...

a simple plan

I had particularly good luck finding materials already cut to workable dimensions: a 12"x 24" roll of cork and three 12" x 6" x 1/8" sheets of plywood. This meant I could immediately get down to business.

There isn't much to this project - I glued cork roll to the plywood and then trimmed the cork on the long edges to give the road a bit of gradient and character. I learned pretty quickly not to be precious with this process, having decided to go back with some Vallejo basing paste to provide texture wherever I had bare plywood:

mind the pothole

And then on to priming, basing, drybrushing, washing, inscribing the traffic lines, and finally sealing the whole thing with clear matte lacquer.

oh man look at those survivors go

This turned out to be a very satisfying project. It's hard to believe it only took a few hours after work for everything from shopping for the most significant materials to finishing it up. I wish every project went so smoothly!

honk honk

Keep an eye out for this road in upcoming post-apoc AARs!