In a classic example or a first world problem, I decided about a year ago that I would get rid of a bunch of different gaming mats and replace them with a small number of the same mat but in different sizes. The theory was that I could then finally get off my butt and start painting (or finishing, in some cases) my collection of terrain projects and get them to match the colour and texture on the mat. It probably doesn't bother most people when the hill is a different shade of green to the mat it was placed on, but it sure bothers me!
So, last year I settled on a mat (the double sided Highlands in War mat from Gamemat.eu) and got myself a 4x4 and 6x4. After a bit of cutting, I ended up with a 4x4, 3x3, 2x2 (and, er, 2x3?) mats all in the same style and pallette.
Six months and one trip to Salute 2026 later and I was suitably inspired to resume this project. I dug out my box of linear obstacles and painted them up, along with some market stalls from Victrix and Wargames Atlantic.
So far, so good. Some amount of green paint on the base of a wall will go a long way to making it 'fit' but because the base of a wall is very small, it isnt apparent that the paint.. or the flock.. or the static grass.. isnt the same shade of green as the mat. It looks fine with almost any shade.
You can't get away with that so easily once you start needing a base to mount the terrain on, so the MDF bases for the market stalls were already starting to reveal the problem. But it was when I did a test scheme for a 3D printed hill that the colour problem became really apparent.
Indoors with natural light. Not bad. The hill looks a little saturated, but it's still pretty good. It doesnt look so good once I turn the lights on.
Outdoors. Not good. I think the satin finish of the mat doesnt help, but here the texture looks a lot more desaturated than the hill.
I tried with just paint, then with woodlands scenic flock over the top, then with some different greens airbrushed over the top of that (pictured). Nothing looked right.
This prompted me to dig out a spare MDF base and try static grass. Indoors it looked great.
Outdoors it looked okay, still not as good as I would like, but still less jarring than the effect on the small hill. So, looking at the pile of terrain I wanted to get through, I decided to get myself a static grass applicator. It arrived, and I got to work. Not on the hill, but instead I went back to my trees which I was never really happy with. Tufts were glued down. A mix of static grasses were applied. More tufts were purchased and glued down. And while the finished trees looked better.. the static grass effect didnt look as good on the tree bases as it did on the standalone base above, despite using the same static grass on the outer part of each tree base.
Outdoors. Looks okay from this angle.. but from above? Nope. Still not doing it for me.
Back to the drawing board, I guess! Right now I'm experimenting with different paints that i can spray onto the static grass on the edges of the bases to achieve a better transition. But if that doesn't work? I may have to accept that the only way to get a good match is to create my own base boards and cover them with the same static grass, just as Chris over at Ash and Stone does.
I still have a half dozen small FDM hills that need to be done yet in the same style, plus some of the re-released GW large hills and corner hills. But once thats all done I will have a good selection of finished terrain that can be used for a variety of different games on a variety of game mat sizes..
