Lord of the Rings Elven Board
A brief description on creating the board we built to accommodate our Elven buildings and the photography. The finished board will be used for our continued Lord of the Rings campaign.
Generic
When building our gaming base boards we aim to make them as generic and as modular as possible. There are always obvious exceptions to this. The rolling hills of the shire or the flat grasslands of Europe are unsuitable to fight a WW2 desert campaign.
Elven Board
This particular board we built to accommodate the eleven buildings from TT Combat. But as I mentioned it has to also work for the many other periods we play, from WW2, Napoleonic to wild west and 40K.
We use foam insulation board carved into shape to make the contours. To create the different levels we glue on separate shaped blocks of insulation board and then textured with sand.
Basing the Buildings
When looking at a few of the buildings we thought we could enhance a couple by adding bases.
Buildings
The buildings were from the TT Combat FANTASY REALMS Range
We chose white for the buildings and picked out detail out in silver and gold with wooden beams where visible The large doors we painted brass. For the roofs we went for a turquoise and for the floors we went for tile effect sheet with a brown wash and fixed this to the walkways.
The board dimensions are 4ft by 4ft. These dimensions will allow the board to be used with other boards in multiple configurations, to make up many different layouts.
Photography
The look is achieved by a combination of multiple exposures overlaid and masked in Photoshop. The whole thing was lit with flash and LED lighting. This is not a photography tutorial so I will keep this basic.
I chose trees that looked particularly old and just so happens these particular trees were built about 25 years ago. I strung 2 sets of lights in the trees and where the cable was visible it was cloned out in photoshop.
If I required more lights it was easy to copy and paste the lights into different areas.
The individual LED Diodes I used as lights inside buildings as single or multiples bulbs.
Battery Operated String Lights
2 sets of lights in the trees
Lights in Buildings
50pcs LED Diodes Light Pre Wired DC 9-12V Emitting Diode LED Lamp Bulb
Final Images
