So instead of continued modelling of the playing pieces (which I swear I'll get to!) I decided to try my hand at painting for what can really be considered the first time.
Until now, I've mostly done larger pieces like daleks, tardises, or other such pieces that are painted in bits and assembled to create the final piece before being weathered, painting an item to look like aged wood was completely new to me. So for those like me who haven't really painted, I'll try and give a run down, everyone else can just admire the pretty pictures.
This was the first attempt at painting, a friend came over to try and teach me the tricks of the trade. They did the top pieces as I did the bottom, and I'll go over the methods used in a moment. At the end of the day I let them take this piece to finish off and I started a fresh one of my own.
The first step was to take my white piece and give it a wood like base that I could then reveal with ageing. This was done with a light sienna paint that was lightly applied and rubbed back almost immediately. I repeated this process until I was happy with the result across the board. While I thought initially I would be brushing across from left to right to simulate the wood effect, this just lifted the paint out of the wood like crevices that had been carved into the piece, so I ended up painting mostly top to bottom, a method that would continue for the rest of the paint job.
In the end giving the whole thing a base coat was sort of useless, as later colours covered up most of these, and trying to rub those other colours back just took this away as well. In the future I'd probably cast the piece in a stained resin to match a wood base, then go over that.
Initially I was trying to paint by colours rather than sections, so I wouldn't have to remix paints. I found a few screenshots from the film that seemed to show the board in the most natural lighting, and I mixed my paints to match those. I was incredibly surprised with how bright and colourful the prop seemed to be, with decently bright reds and greens. I figured I'd match to the prop rather than how it appears in a lot of the film, and if I didn't like it I could darken it later.
I used rather watery acrylics which worked really well for this application. Here I had done the greys of the mountains and the browns in the board. Invariably I would forget to paint a section in a specific colour, or mess up with another colour so areas would have to be repainting meaning I ended up mixing these colours over and over again, better planning would have solved this problem very early.
This was also where I discovered that most of my plans to rub back paint to reveal the light browns underneath didn't really work. With very careful application of the monkey I got some bits to work, but in nearly every area where it looks like paint has been rubbed away, it was just fresh paint placed over the top, like with the mountains. Thankfully the very thin acrylics meant these areas didn't pop up anymore than other areas and the illusion is very convincing, even when holding the piece in your hands.
One of the bits I was more scared of painting was the hunter. Stylised animals were all well and good, but painting a person without them looking weird was something I was incredibly apprehensive of. I ended up spending a few hours on the hunter alone, with about 5 shades of various skin tones mixed up to get some good highlighting and shading on his face for what rather works as a natural skin tone. It almost makes him stand out too much as compared to the rest of the board (especially in this picture) but he has more detail painted onto him in the film prop, so while it looked a little weird, I guess it was technically accurate.
Here's a close up to show my wonderful work on this handsome man's face. A lot of the detail ended up being painted on that simply wasn't there in the sculpt. For example, the man really doesn't have any lips, so careful shading was applied to make him look less alien. I think I erred on the side of too much painted on detail, but trust me, without it he looked even weirder.
The rest of the board was then just layering up colour after colour to try and get something that matched the film prop. After very careful scrutiny of the bluray, it seemed that apart from the highlights of paint being rubbed away (probably easiest to see on the elephant and mountains), the rest of the damage is the "stained red" wood of the boarder rubbing away, then a lot of grime being added. There was a surprising amount of grime added to the board, mostly carefully to make the details of the sculpt pop, with the final paint being applied was the red "wood stain" which took hours to get right. This was a few layers, layering red, then birch colours on top of each other to really get the look of an aged wooden part.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It certainly "pops" in photographs, but it still seems to stand up to the closest colours to the original film board. I'm not sure how I feel about the leaves at the bottom, or the bright colours in general. It might be accurate to the "prop" but these things never look the same on screen, and I'll have to wait until I've fitted it to a completed board to see whether I'm really happy with how it looks. If I don't end up liking it, it'll be easy enough to take out though and make a darker more muted version.
For context, the last time I tried making a Jumanji board, it ended up looking like this:
So I guess you could say I'm fairly pleased with the improvement. Just a little bit.