TSS

Here are the refurbished TSS tiles

thomasriepe , , , ,

So now I finished redoing the first batch of my terrain tiles. 8 river tiles and 11 hill tiles. There are a lot more tiles to be done as you can see on the pictures as I mixed old ones with the redone ones to build the table you see on the pictures. There are some more river tiles, open grassland tiles, track tiles and some settlement tiles to be redone or newly build over the next coming months . Here are the pictures !

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Hope you like what you see

Just realized that I didn’t put up a before and after picture:

The flocking of the river tiles is finished

thomasriepe , , ,

I finished the flocking of the river tiles yesterday. On some pictures the PVA hasn’t dried completely, therefore it is not translucent everywhere . The grass tufts were made with the flockbox, the other flocking materials are from woodland scenics and Noch.

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The next step will be trimming the reeds and painting on the gloss varnish on the river proper.

The TSS tiles before flocking commences

thomasriepe , , , , ,

Here are all tiles I am working on at the moment . I finished dry brushing the rocks and will start flocking everything at the weekend.

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As you can see the original flocking is not the same on the boards, so I will have to change that during flocking. The flock used will be the one you can see on the river boards. But this will only be the flocking base I will add different shades and length of grass to make it look more natural.

Started coloring the rock faces of the hills

thomasriepe , , , ,

I managed to dry brush the first layer of the rock faces in. This is a heavy drybrush of a medium grey. This will be followed by a few more layers of increasingly lighter shades of grey.

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The colors are only different on the pictures as the lighting wasn’t equal on every picture. Sorry.

Completed the earth shades on my Hill tiles

thomasriepe , , , ,

I completed the earth shades of my hill tiles yesterday. I used a basecoat of light brown, a wash of van dyk brown and a highlight of light brown. All done with an airbrush.

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The above picture shows the basecoat and the wash only. The following pictures show the completed earth shades:

Now there is only the gravel and the rocks to be painted then the flock.

 

I used old TSS tiles to build Hill contours

thomasriepe , , , ,

The next project in my terrain refurbishing project was creating a hill contour to elevate the terrain another 4 cm ( the hight of a tile) . I will use these to represent contour lines on the table like on maps.

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On this picture you can see the old tiles . These were donated by my good friend Simon. Thank you again Simon!

The white slabs of Styrene will be the conectors between the different tiles to make the contours modular. They were shaped with a template and cut with a hot wire cutter. This is the template in action:

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Here you can see the hill contour build up with styrene and cork bark:

And in another configuration:

Next step was to add ready mixed filler:

That is how far I got last weekend. I have another 7 tiles to do. I will add pictures to the blog when I do the next step.

The next step of the renovation of my river tiles.

thomasriepe , , , ,

Here are pictures of the first layer of the river painted . I used a mix of PVA , ready mixed filler and blue paint to get rid of the styrene structure on the board:

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I will post pictures when the river is completely painted. Before flocking the boards I will start doing hill contour boards too. I want to do the flocking on all boards simultaneously to get the look consistent.

Next step in redoing my TSS river tiles

thomasriepe , , ,

Over the weekend I could do a bit more work on my river tiles. Next step was painting the gravel and rocks in a basecoat brown ( I use Schminke acrylics for all my terrain painting).

Then I applied a wash of Van Dyk brown ( Schminke) . I made the wash myself , following the instructions found on this video by the terrain tutor.

 

So you get something like this:

Then I did a dry brush with the basecoat color:

After that I did a wet brush ( basically a heavy dry brush with more paint on the brush then with a dry brush) followed by a dry brushed highlight on the rocks:

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This is the result up to now . Next step will be the water then flocking and gloss varnish for the water. Will be back when the next steps are done.

 

Refurbishing my TSS tiles.

thomasriepe , , , ,

As I said in another post a few weeks back I wanted to improve my trusty TSS tiles / boards. These are tiles measuring 1foot by 1 foot or 30,5 x 30,5 cm square. I have lots of them and after acquiring a foam cutter I even did some by myself. So after using them for years I wanted to give them a make over. I started with my river tiles. When they come from TSS ( Total System Scenic) they look like this:

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As you can see the river clearly shows the structure of the styropor used to make the tiles. Doesn’t look very natural when you ask me. So I wanted to do a better water effect on these river tiles. But before that the banks have to be done properly. Like this :

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I added gravel, sand and little stones to the river banks. Next will be paint and flock. With the following tile I wanted to recreate a steeper higher bank of the river . I used cork bark, ready mixed filler Styropor and gravel,sand and stones, to come up with this:

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Here are some more pictures of my other river tiles:

The last board has a very thin layer of filler on the actual river to get rid of the styropor structure. I will do this to the others too but will mix paint with the filler to have a bisect to work with too. So over the next week I will add more so watch this space!