3DAlienWorlds BLOG

Painting tatami bases

Here's a quick step-by-step guide to painting tatami mat textures, for the new tatami mat bases set!



£ 1. Fill in any gaps you don't want. I printed my bases in PLA, in multiple parts for each base. The join lines don't really bother me (as they're quite authentically 'tatami'), but since I'll be gifting these bases to a friend, I thought I'd better neaten them up. So I dabbed a little bit of woodfiller putty on the bigger gaps and smoothed them in with a wet finger.

£ 2. I base-coated them in a creamy flesh tone colour, with a couple of coats. For the farmhouses I actually started with a sandy yellow and drybrushed up in lighter tones, but for these I wanted a slightly fresher looking tatami (because tatami mats yellow with age) and planned only to use washes.

£ 3. Next came 3 (yes, three!!) coats of sepia wash, letting each one dry between washes. This brings out the texture of the tatami prints nicely. Sorry, in this pic I think the contrast with the white table made the camera take a darker shot than the real versions.

£ 4. Tatami mats are normally bordered in strips of thick fabric, usually navy blue or green in colour. If you want to really go to town, you could add faint flecks of gold thread embroidery in repeating patterns, too!

£ 5. As a final stage, I washed the fabric borders (both blue AND green) in a brown wash, to deepen the shadows and to dull down the colours slightly. After all, they're not supposed to be too bright.

With that, they were done!

I painted up this wonderful onna-bugeisha (female warrior samurai) model, by Warlord Games, and mounted it on this tatami base. Looks pretty nifty as a shrine maiden!

Name
Comments
Enter Code