Building Roads

I've been missing decent tarmac roads in my towns for a long time and finally got round to creating some.

For the job I bought some cheap (B&Q basic) textured black self adhesive vinyl floor tiles, and cut them into 6" x 9" sections (the size will become apparent later). I thought I could just do a quick dry brush with a dark grey to bring out the texture, but it the result was a streaky, so a light patchy spray of matt black, targeting the worst streaks, brought everything back down a bit (see below). I tried to be as sparing with the paint application as possible to avoid potential warping. I did take a few pictures of the various stages, but they all came out looking the same black oblongs!

A tile section brushing, sprayed and looking black!

Next a piece of cereal packet cardboard was but to the 6" x 9" and a couple of center lines were cut to template road markings. I was going to stipple white paint over the template areas, but couldn't find my tube of white paint and used white spray instead. A double edged sword this, as the spray gives a nice light coverage, but where the template was not flush the edges were feathered so need tidied up with black when the white had dried. I also wrestled with whether the roads would be right or left hand drive for the junctions but in the end , realising it didn't matter, used the cardboard edge to mask off a couple of section ends and sprayed right across the entire junction.

The result is a relatively clean tarmac road which I can use for my modern and beyond games. With a few craters, rubble sections They'll even manage in a ruined cityscape (as per the top photo).

Now onto phase 2. Remember the the attempt at intrigue over the 6" x 9" tile size? Well this is the largest tile size of Dave Graffam's Cobbled tile toolkit product, where you can create and print cobbled sections with a combination of various textured layers.

I had printed out a a few various cobbled sections beforehand. These are then just carefully applied to the reverse of the tarmac tiles on the self adhesive side, which gives a lovely tight dry bind (although be warned, there is no repositioning the paper with this tough glue!). This results in a nice cobbled street layout for no extra storage space. Bonus!

The cobbled side will be good for main streets in Fantasy towns or for Victorian era gaming.