Towel fields - more experiments

In an attempt to create more cheap, easy fields I spent some more time this week trying a few ideas. The top photos are are the same field. It was a square of hand towel that I soaked in an ice cream tub that had watered down green acrylic craft paint from The Works. I soaked it for a minute and took it out hen left to dry.  It took a few days to dry,  but that may have had something to do with me not squeezing out excess water, and leaving it on my cutting mat. Once I hung it on the railing in my garden it dried faster. It is pretty crispy and I like it. The paint is also a bituneven which lends itself to looking real. Some of the material is also quite matted down which I also like. 

However, I wanted to try it out a little differently next time. So I took an entire towel and soaked it in a bigger ice cream tub with a mixture that was more watery than the last one. I also tried squeezing out excess moisture, but it started going white again. I then hung it on the line. The tub of ice cream never had a layer deeper than 2cm of paint mixture but I did have to top it up a few times. I am pleased with how it looks and it took about 24 hours on the line to dry through...although a few times I had to hide it in the play house due to rain showers. 

I wonder what will happen when I chop it up.

Flanel Fields

I hate the boring green gaming mat I sometimes use. The plain desert mats are okay. The fake grass from Lidl are also decent, although can still be quite boring. Unless I absolutely throw down with scatter terrain, there is just so much blank green. So my search to shake things up a bit led me to watch this video. It inspired me to go to Tesco and spend £1 on two tan coloured face washing cloths (my mum raised me calling these "flannels"). I cut out some squares and painted them up as follows:

I much prefer how the green one came out. Although I watered the green paint down to really soak into the cloth. The brown one had neat paint, which I think was a mistake, although it isn't that bad. I might dry brush a few other brighter colours on it to be fair. 

All in all I am pretty happy with these. The only problem is that they are thicker than I was expecting, and I have no idea what kind of wash cloth the guy in the YouTube tutorial used because that one appears much thinner. The ends also curl up a little, but that isn't too bad. 

For the cost, they are fine. The most time consuming thing is getting the green paint on.