DIY Battlefield, third stages

I made a fair amount more progress on the Snow board One of the main things that I see whenever a Snow board is referenced is the disparity between blue and grey tinting to the snow.

Normally when you see these boards completed they always have a very grey tint to them, and that's not necessarily the look that I would expect to have for a field of snow.

See the picture, blue sky, dark shadows on the snow.

You'd expect blue with ice, not so much with snow.

I ran a couple of testers to see if I could identify which look I wanted most across the whole board. 

First I started at the middle right of this picture below with some blue glaze across an entire area, and then some white drybrush highlights. Ok.

Then on the right I tried just blue washes inside the recesses and craters, focussing on where the ice would collect. Ok.

On the left I then tried out just a straightforward tinting of the snow, which I didn’t massively like.

I noticed while doing this that part of my board had a darker tint than the other sections, and it appeared that my very light grey mix was a bit darker in that area. So I dutifully took my drybrush and went to town over the whole thing. And that started looking good. 

The darker grey basecoat when overbrushed (more in a second) looks loads better than the blue tinted. It was far more monochrome and more distinctly grim. 

I think it gave a more realistic tint to true snow, rather than ice. Good. Lets try that.

My only issue was that now I needed to rebase the entire board grey. Ho-hum. Another couple of drying days later and it looked like this. 

When I’d drybrushed the smaller section it looked good, but took ages. Not wanting to repeat that process I tried something else. Still using a large brush but a larger amount of paint I tried overbrushing (or my version of it).

I took the brush, got the paint on it, and then almost horizontally to the board dragged the brush across it. The tops of the raised areas would get a hefty dose of paint, while the recesses would be relatively clear. Done right (and always in alternative directions) its far far quicker to do (and more distinct I felt) than trying to get an even drybrush across the entire thing. 

  On the larger surface areas I made a point to stipple larger areas too, so that they would appear whiter. Remember to vary your stipple pattern too.

With that mainly complete. I now move onto the detail, and I’ll be done!