Home-made Flexible Roads
By Fons Libert

We all know the flexible latex roads that are sold by several wargames traders. They look extremely good and are very useful, but unfortunately they are also very expensive. 

I needed about 30 to 40 feet of road and I could not afford to order them from a trader cause it would probably have ruined me financially. So, I broke out the tools and made my own flexible roads. You can see the result of my DIY in the picture on the right. I will explain how I made these cheap but excellent roads in the following paragraphs.  Have fun making your own !

I made my roads from cheap, acrylic mastic (You guys probably have another word for it). I used mastic from the brandname Rubson but you can use any other acrylic mastic AS LONG as it says that you can paint over it. I used brown mastic cause it gives me a basecoat for free, but white or gray mastic will work just as well. The mastic is applied to shapes cut from cheap kitchen and home cleaning cloths that can be bought for a few $ in any supermarket and shop.  The ones that you can buy here in Belgium (10 in a pack, 40cm square) are excellent and I used them cause they are very cheap, but you can use any other kind of fabric or cloth, as long as it is not too thick and too stiff. 

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TIP: if you use fabric or cloth with folds and creases in it, iron it to get the creases out before you apply the mastic because it will show and you will never get them out of your finished roads. 

Apply the mastic and spread it out evenly with a spatula, or a knife or whatever else you want to use. It is important that the mastic covers the entire fabric of the shape that you are making. 

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You do not have to make it all nice and smooth, dirt roads seldom are, but it needs to cover the entire piece of fabric or it WILL show through later.

Put a couple pebbles into the mastic to simulate boulders and sprinkle it with generous amounts of fine cat litter material, or very coarse sand to simulate the smaller pebbles that can be found on any dirt road. Push the pebbles into the mastic but DO NOT do the same with the cat litter or sand. We want most of it to come off later. 

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Let it dry for 10 to 20 minutes to make the mastic less sticky and easier to handle and then you can model it with a toothpick for instance.  You can "draw" cart or car tracks, or push a spare piece of track into the mastic to simulate tanktracks. 

Let the mastic dry for at least 24 hours. It will stay flexible, that's what we want isn't it, but it really needs to be completely dry before you paint it. Remove the excess cat litter at this moment. 

You can use any paint you have or like but I used acrylic wallpaint from the DIY store cause its cheap, it doesn't smell and it dries real quick. It comes in small 155 ml containers that are perfect for this. 

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I painted my roads in 3 stages. First I applied a chocolatebrown basecoat (left picture). The paint needs to be well diluted so that it applies fast and easy and so that it does not cover everything. We want the darkbrown mastic color to remain visible in the deeper areas such as the cart tracks and so.  

Darken up your basecoat with black or dark brown paint and turn it into a wash by adding more water. Apply this wash over everything (right picture) The wash accumulates in the deeper regions and around pebbles, edges etc and that gives a nice 3D look to your roads.
 

Let it all thoroughly dry and then its time to drybrush. First drybrush with a lightbrown color. You really need to be subtle and put on a light drybrush, else you just get lightbrown roads and that's not the result we want. You want our drybrush to pick out the higher regions such as the pebbles, cat litter and edges of the tracks and so (left picture). 

A second drybrush with creme colored paint must even be lighter then the first one.  When that's done, pick out the pebbles with the same paint and a small brush (right picture).

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And then there's only one more step to go and that is applying flock to the painted parts. Apply dilluted PVA glue (woodworking glue) to the sides of your road parts and sprinkle generous amounts of flock over it. You can if you wish also apply glue and flock to the center of the road (see picture) but remember that in the days of horse and cart transportation the horse walked in the middle of the road. There would therefore grow no grass there like it does nowadays cause the horses would have trotten it down. Back to the flock, push it into the glue with your finger and tap away the excess flock and that's it, we're done!.

You can see in the two picture above this how much roads you can make with 1,5 tubes of mastic, 10 kitchen cloths and 3 small pots of paint for a total cost of less than $20. It does however takes a lot of work, I spent about 12 hours making these roads but hey, I would do that anyday to save hundreds of $. ;-)

TIP: After you have painted and flocked your flexible roads they tend to warp a bit.  Break out the ol' iron again and iron them with their fabric side up (NOT the mastic side up).  You can put your wife at ease, it will not harm your iron but it will straighten out your flexiroads. ;-)