The "Bloody Omaha" boards in detail

Since I'm sure someone will ask, and I spent Tuesday finishing off the boards with our terrain-builder par excellence AndyM, I figure it's time for a few photos and some explanation of how it all went together.

The foam for the boards is from craftfoam.co.uk: mostly it's 50mm thick, 600mm square sheets, although a couple of boards are made of two layers of 25mm. Each is based on 3mm hardboard (to protect the corners), of which more later, and held on with No More Nails or (now) Loctite Power Grab (a US import!). The final board is 8'x6' and at one point three layers high.

Here's how they originally looked, bare of paint. The trenches were cut with either a router or a jigsaw (which is surprisingly easy, though I do recommend doing it outdoors AND wearing a dust mask). The edges were sloped using a mix of jigsaw and hot wire cutter, and then sanded (again, dust mask!). One of the tricks is that where slopes meet the edge of the boards, they're all at a point some multiple of 150mm from one end, and slope from 50mm to 0 in 150mm, which makes them at least semi-modular. (You've actually seen several of the boards in some of my Italy games (often hidden under a battle mat), as Sails of Glory coastline and as part of our Dambusters game!)

A mark I beach board.

Next step was undercoating with a pale brown household emulsion and applying lots of Javis Summer static grass. The four beach boards were sprayed with blue, then green,, then Rustoleum sand texture in bands from the seaward edge, and then the shingle bank added with ballast scatter and PVA on top of a bank made of lightweight filler.

2014-era boards

And that, with a few bits of clump foliage, is where the boards were for 2014's 70th anniversary of D-Day. In terms of sheer size, they looked pretty impressive, but they had a number of problems:

• We never painted the edges of the board, so any slight unevenness in the table they were set on looked awful as it showed every bit of bright, light blue foam.
• The cliffs on the beach boards were a rush job and really needed a repaint.
• It looked a bit like playing on a tennis court with outbreaks of moss.
• The earth colour for the trenches was way too pale.
• The $%^&*() beach boards, being basically done on 3mm hardboard, warped A LOT as the layers of paint dried. 

We tried several things to fix the warping, including painting the backs with PVA, to no avail. 

Come 2019 and the 75th anniversary, we decided it needed a bit of tarting up, not just for the above issues but because the boards had got a bit banged about.

In particular, over two evenings AndyM and I:

• completely rebuilt the beach boards on 9mm MDF. Same approach (blue then green then 

  

  Mark 2 beach board closeup.

   rown then Rustoleum textured paint in bands), and we managed to save the old cliffs, and cut them down so their height still matched the adjacent boards. The shingle bank is a mix of about four different grades and manufacturers of stone/sand basing materials.
• edged the boards with Santex Bitter Chocolate, that staple paint of terrain builders everywhere 
• repainted the inside of the trench works with artists burnt umber acrylic (although the Santex would have done just as well and is a pretty close match). 
• smudged/drybrushed the burnt umber on all the grass, then added some War World Scenics winter (parched) grass and clump foliage in patches
• some of the boards on the bottom layer are made from Javis grass sheet, and look even more tennis-court-like. I took sandpaper to them to remove some of the grass before adding the patches of burnt umber and WWS grass.
• added extra bright green grass to delineate the marsh area

2019 boards

And that is pretty much that. If I had time I'd fix the two or three underneath boards that don't quite match, and maybe make some of the patches of other grass and brown less 'patchy' :D 

Otherwise, pretty pleased with that.

Next up, figures, defences, basing, labels!