Urban terrain board - Base painting

The terrain board is now in it's next step of painting the base coat. One jar of black  acrylic paint, a little water and some play sand got me a nice deep base coat with some solid asphalt texture.

Here's some key things I learned;
First - never use a good house painting brush your wife just gets mad, and mad wives are no fun.
Second - Get a smaller brush than you think you need, sure the 5" brush will cover a lot of space faster, it just won't do it necessarily better. By having a smaller brush you're able to make the texture less patterned.
Third - Add water to the acrylic. Seriously, thin it a little more than you think you need to because once you add that sand in (slowly!) you're going to make a painting mud. Keep stirring before each and every application of paint.
Fourth - Don't paint, stipple. Gently dip the brush into the mix, make a glob on the board and stipple it out spreading it. Not only does this minimize patterning it eliminates brush strokes, something that the sand in the bristles will accentuate.
Fifth - Have fun! Don't stress about how perfect or not this is going to be, it's just a base layer for all the cool stuff to come. Enjoy the process!

Next up on the project will be drybrushing grey down heavily, then making a black wash. Lines will then be made using a marker/pencil then dry brushing of a deep warm brown (reddish hues) will be laid down over the lines, then a cool brown (bluish hues) will provide highlights.Again another healthy layer of black wash, thinned out further still.

After that pegs to hold it together, then the terrain to put on top. 

Stipple, not brushing. Stippling was done upper right, brushing elsewhere.

The very wet result. As of this morning it's completely matte and rock hard.

Remember, you need a place to actually let it all dry. This worked very well and was dry overnight.