Finished our Zuzzy Mats

We finally finished our Zuzzy mats, and just in time for the tournament this weekend too! People are going to love hiding in the woods, and running through the broken city streets from 40k zombies (I love zombies)!

I picked up where I left off earlier this week, ink washing the different textures of my mat in two different shades of green. This is the step that took the longest. Luckily, it is followed by the easiest step- drybrushing. Let the ink sit for a couple hours and completely dry, this is extremely important because if you get impatient and don’t wait long enough you will mess up your drybrushing. (Its hard to DRY brush on a mat that is wet….)

Anyway, then I took a two inch paint brush from the hardware store and grabbed another of my Citadel paints – Elysian Green. I used that to highlight all the high spots over the entire mat. This helped to give it a little more depth and also tie the two shades together a little bit to provide some unity.

After I finished all the drybrushing (which actually didn’t take long at all), Teddy used a can of spray sealant and sprayed a thin coat over the mat just for added protection to my paint job. The Zuzzy mat website claims that sealing is unnecessary, and I believe them. However, with the amount of play our mats get on a daily basis, a little extra protection never hurts!

We let that set overnight and then used some carpet tape to secure the mat permanently to our table. We weren’t originally planning to do that, but the edges were starting to curl up a little bit and we didn’t want that. And, that’s it! The mat is all ready to play on, and so is the city map actually.

After Teddy finished ink washing his mat, he used Citadel Dawnstone and the same technique to drybrush over the black and give some added dimension and age to the asphalt.

Here are both the mats covered in terrain and ready to play!

**Originally posted 11-1-2013