Building A Greathelm Frame Board

Here is a very quick run down of how i made my A4 Greathelm Frame board.

Materials
A4 picture Frame
Sheet of Cork 301 x 300 x 4.7 mm
PVA Glue or wood glue
Cheap Paints – Black, brown, White, Yellow
Knife
sculpting tool
sand or texture paste.
Mod podge

Step one.
Cut the cork sheet into a mix of 1x1cm, 2x2cm and 3x3cm squares. You can also cut some 1x2cm, 2x3cm rectangles for more variation.

Bevel the edge of the cork bricks. This can be done by running the back of a craft knife along the edge of the bricks to roughen them up. I found using the textured? Part of my sculpting tool worked quite well.
I found it easier to bevel bricks as i placed them down instead of all of them at once just incase i had left overs.

Step Two.
Remove the glass or plastic from the frame. If the frame has a stand on the back you can remove it or tape it down while you work on the board.
Create a perimeter of bricks around the edge of the board. (do not glue them down at this point)
Some adjustments may need to be made to the bricks to get them to fit.
Once you’re happy with the edge layout, you can start glueing them down onto the frame backing board. you can leave it in the frame for now to get a nice fit between the frame and the bricks.

Step Three
Fill in the rest of the Board.

Step Four
I added some sand and texture past to the larger gaps. (i also used some of the bits of cork from beveling the bricks)

Step Five
Painting. removed the frame, so you just have the backing board and bricks. You can then prime this with some dark paint and Mod Podge.

Once the prime is dry. I added some different brown tones.

Once the brown tones had dried i mixed some grey tones and dry brushed the whole lot.

i then added a wash to ad some variation and picked out some of the dirt and sand.

Step Six
Adding the final details. i added some grass tuffs into some of the larger gaps. you could add more texture paste or grout to fill the gaps. i had done an experiement with part of the board and didnt really like the results myself.

Step Seven
The final step is to go play some Greathelm

Notes: I would make some changes if i did this again, but have found that these frame boards are a great way to experiement with some different materials and products before doing a much larger board.