There Will Be Oil (Stain)

Friday morning: Half-inch hail hit the yard.  I live in Hawaii,
it's not every day that frozen water falls from the sky here.

Despite the deluge, on Friday I primed the sewers in flat white and hit them with a coat of black oil stain.  It's not nearly dark enough, nor did the stain penetrate deep into the cracks.  The mottling looks good, but this might need a black basecoat and building colors up from there.  We'll have to see about this.

While the stain dried, I started in on a new tile.  At some point the poor looters might get ambushed before they even get to the dungeon, so here's a single outdoor tile, just in case.  As you can see, I started with a piece of foamcore, and used a blunt mechanical pencil to press out grid marks.  Then I carved out a stream channel, and glued some spare foam in place for rocks to mark a small ford.  It's near the top of the tile in these photos.

The stream channel leaves that portion of the tile pretty flimsy.  It acts almost like a hinge, begging to be torn.  To keep that from happening, I glued a fitted piece of 2mm matte board to the base of this tile, and left it pressing under 5 pound weights overnight.

This is also a bit of a test piece to see if foamcore will work well for building 3D terrain for 10mm figures.  At 5mm in height it works great for shallow dips like this.  Time will tell if it works for larger, as in 2 story, structures.