September Project #1---Game Mat, Green

Following suggestions from "Anton's Blog" via The Miniatures Page,  I purchased 2 "Ecorugs" from Lowe's to make into gaming mats.

The reason I had been urgently dithering over table size was the new mats would have to fit whatever table size I decided upon,   However, last night I came up with a solution, cut the mats to 6'x5', which would cover either 5x5 or 6x4 with a 6 inch overhang on 2 sides of either configuration.

Next step, cutting green mat to size:

This, as is, would be fine if battles were fought on a football field, and in any case would be and improvement over the nasty old green sheet I've been using.  But, the advice was to dry brush or spray paint some brownish color overtop in order to make it look more natural.    Anton said that the dry brushing process in this case was brutal, so I decided on the spray paint.

I did some test runs on the left-over piece:

I asked Katie, who is really into art (but is smart enough to study Chemistry in order to find real work) whether the light areas or dark areas (shown above) looked better.  She deemed the lighter areas better, so I proceeded on to the actual spray.

The final green game mat. The rug was $20 and I had all the other supplies.