A DIY battlemat

Battlemats are a very comfortable way to build a gaming table for any wargame. Printed on them is a top-view of a battleground and you just put on terrain pieces. I own several of different companies, most of them made from neoprene, like mousepads.

Now, there's one thing those mats just don't provide: real texture. It's just a print, after all. For this, one needs to build a whole table (mostly done in foam and some wood) - which has to be stored somewhere between games. If you don't own a dedicated gaming-basement, this is a real problem.  Battlemats can be rolled and stored rather easily on the other hand.

So, how to combine both things? By crafting a battlemat with texture, of course.

All you need is fleece (like for covering the floor when painting), some cheap acrylics and flock/grass.

First, cut the fleece a bit larger than the actual mat will be. Then get the paints and begin to paint the terrain you want to simulate - try to blend different colours when the paint is still wet, so there're no hard edges between them.

On smaller mats I use ready-made texture paint for artists, but on larger projects, it is cheaper to buy some painter's acrylic and mix it with some paint and sand. This is used for earth and sand areas.

This will probably look like some expressionistic picture in the end...

The paint will take some 12 hours to dry (at least when you're doing it in winter, like I did), so best leave it over night.

After the paint has dried, you can use watered PVA-glue to apply various kinds of flocks and static grass to the mat.

Leaving the glue to dry, I made myself a wash of dark brown (just thin the paint with lots of water), and washed down the 'earth' and 'gravel' parts of the mat.
This adds some depth to these areas.

When the wash has dried (yeah, there's quite some 'drying-time' involved), I could apply some dry-brushing with Ivory paint.

Almost done! All we need now, is to apply some clear paint to provide added fixture for the flocks and grass. I used a coat of spray Army Painter Anti-Shine for this.

And how does it look in actual play?

There are still the folding lines of the fleece (maybe I'll try ironing next time...) visible, but otherwise, it looks a lot more 'alive' than the printed mats.

A Barrow-wight leading Angmar orcs

Legolas leading Mirkwood rangers

A ranger-captain and his warband confronting Angmar orcs

The close-ins show the difference to printed mats quite nicely. If you do pictures of your battles (or battlereps and vids), this looks a lot more like those beautiful tables you see in gaming-clubs and on the net.
Additionally, those mats are a lot cheaper than those printed on neoprene...