Terrain Workshop

I had a little time to kill one day after work and before an appointment so I wandered into a Michael's to take a look around.  I knew they carried clone brick sets at one point and I figured I'd have a look see at what they had in stock.  Turns out they now carry Lego but that's a different story.

I wandered into the scrapbooking aisle and saw multiple types of paper with colorful designs and prints on them.  This immediately gave me an idea for a table cover that wasn't made of felt and also had multiple colors, prints, and/or textures that made it look like the covering was multiple terrain types at once.

That was the initial idea.  Later, I had the thought that these paper products could be combined with a felt covering in a sort of "mixed media" effort at creating a cool table-setting.  I didn't abandon the original idea but with PAX Unplugged coming up quickly I got working on incorporating the second idea into the terrain I had already planned on bringing to the con.

This is what I started with.  I've always thought that water was a hard thing
to represent well so a picture of ripples in actual water looked good to me.

I then cut the pages -- three of them -- into sections of straight
lines and curves.  These can be assembled into a straight line or a
series of bends.  This can represent a river, canal, or whatever.

I also had plenty of paper left over to cut into "greebles" or smaller sections

of water.  (And looking at that picture I now have another idea for terrain.)

I took two of those leftover bits and cut them into smaller

sections. It's amazing what you can do with negative space.

Next is sand.  The original idea was using this as a section of beach.

To implement the second idea I purchased more -- this is just

one page -- and cut them into sections to act as a road or path.

Once again, plenty of leftover sections and fun with negative space.

All of these were added to the forest section of the "Sand & Trees"

set-up.  Which then became the "Cherry Blossom Forest" table-setting.

The main problem is going to be storing these so they don't get bent or crinkled.

And I feel like I'm going to be doing enough of these terrain posts that I'm not going to bother numbering them.