Painting Blog 13

It's been more than 6 months - so it's time for another painting blog! This time about terrain, dungeon tiles specifically.

Here are dungeon tiles from Modular Realms, a small British business that have been painted.

Prepped for varnishing.

What's so special about them? Well, the tiles are magnetic and snap together in an incredibly satisfying way!
More than that - they can be rotated, turned and twisted in pretty any way desired and will still snap together in a way that seems to taunt the laws of magnetism.
However, when you play with the tiles for a little bit, you'll discover this is achieved by having magnets on spinners inside the tiles which will correctly align as needed.
It's clever stuff.

​Painting them was a little bit more of a mission than I expected due to using having to also use a black ink wash (As well as a normal black wash.) to emphasise the gaps between flagstone but ultimately I'm happy with the results.
I also used the 'sponge method' as espoused by Annabelle, owner of Modular Realms for highlighting instead of the usual dry brushing. It was something I'd not done before and was a bit stressful but as stated above I'm happy with the results.

Stoney!

One of the other great things about Modular Terrain is that it's double-sided!
There are various different combinations of terrain that are available (When not out of stock!) and I bought the flagstone/wood combo.
Conversely to the flagstone side, the wooden sides were dry brushed.

Woody!

There are also a number of double sided cobblestone styled tiles which can be used as... well cobblestones or walls.

These come in 25x25mm and 25x50mm sizes.

The two rooms below were put together in literally seconds and wont easily come apart.
​Fantastic!

​If you look at the Modular Realms website, you'll see a lot of interesting ways to use the tiles.
​
Finally, it all comes wrapped up in a neat package that uses - wait for it... magnets to hold it closed (Magnets FTW!).

I think personally I might have preferred more 2x2 tiles than 3x3 as I've found a lot of dungeon maps use double-width corridors between rooms and they'd have found use there.
And while I understand why the cobblestone tiles are the size they are to retaining size  compatibility, I'm 50/50 about using them as walls because they're a bit too tall for my preference.

These are minor quibbles though and overall if you don't mind a little effort to paint them (And I didn't.) they're worth considering, I think these are excellent and I'm looking forward to using them (Which hopefully will be soon!).

Finally, I'll add that I backed a recent kickstarter which adds differently shaped and themed tiles as well as dressing to the mix.