Gorram Tracy Island

Sitting watching The Weekender on Friday I had an “oh bugger” moment when Gerry mentioned the TerrainFest was coming to a close soon. I’ve been going through a fair bit of stress at work so far this year and so have lost all sense of time which, it turns out is bad and good. Bad because I’ve not worked on Tracy Island since November. Good because I forgot how weeks work and actually have an extra one before my 40k game day which means if I push really hard, I can do both.

So, let’s make the world in seven days shall we? Or at least a fictional island.

1. I needed the base board. I’ve had this piece of MDF for a few years now and it has been used a fair bit for a solo skirmish table top. The thing is, I bought it for a different table build but haven’t got round to that so technically it is freely available to use for this project. It is 700mm x 700mm because that was the biggest it could be before shipping jumped in price and I’m a cheapskate. It is 10mm thick and has foam furniture pads on the bottom of it to protect tables from scratching.
2. Next I needed to cut my Thunderbird hangars to size:

• Thunderbird 1 The yoghurt pot was pretty straight forward as you just measure the height of the toy and cut a little above it. The top of this is the ground level for the main part of the playable island
• Thunderbird 2 The tissue box was easy enough and I shoved the off-cut inside the box to give it a bit of rigidity for the papier-mâché stage.
• Thunderbird 3 I decided to go with the Pringles pot over the toilet roll inner just for accessibility for adult hands. The height of it needed to be a bit higher than ground level as it becomes part of the building which hides the entrance. This was largely just eyeballed.

3. Before sticking anything down, I drew out some plans to get a better idea of making a more playable space; even trying my best, this is going to be a very small table size. Ho-hum, it’ll have to do. I used pennies as stand ins for bases to work out path widths and staircases.
4. Then things got messy! After sticking down the hangars and using my earlier house building to keep me right, I set about papier-mâché the landform. We don’t get newspapers in the library anymore so I’ve been saving the brown paper that companies use in packages for months. I was so confident that I had enough but in the end, I went through pretty much all of it. After a couple of hours I had the basics in and a layer of smoother paper over the top to form a skin. There is another layer of tin foil to go over top of everything to the paper skin was more a way to remind me as I was working that I was happy with an area and to leave it alone. Now we leave it to dry…

This was a really fun afternoon. It was my six day week at work this week and so tiredness combined with the aforementioned stress meant that just switching off all internet and putting on some music for an afternoon of playing round with paper and glue was perfect.

By restricting myself to only the materials used in the original Blue Peter craft, it has been weirdly freeing. Every time I started to overthink problems and look around for other solutions to hand, I just reminded myself that this was what I had and I just need to make do. If left to my own devices I would have built a much more stable (and I suspect durable) island but it would also have taken me twice as long because I would have gone raking through cupboards and tinkering to get the best materials for the job.

Instead, this is what we have. For better or for worse.