Texture Rollers: these perspex rollers made by GreenStuff World (http://www.greenstuffworld.com) create textures for base work, including cobblestones, planks, paving, cracked ice, metal grids and steel plates. There are also ones for Celtic type symbols and arcane runes. You can use them with any kind of putty or clay that hardens and there are detailed video tutorials on their website. For workable imprinting, they suggest adding plasticine to Epoxy putty, something I never knew was possible to do – so something useful learned.

Although they are really intended for gamers, I found the idea so irresistible I bought two sets of these. I hope to get some use out of them making bases for 54mm and 80mm figures.


After reading something on the web, I tried using the rollers on styrofoam board. I had to press pretty hard but I did manage to imprint them. Here are some examples with colour washes. I had planned to just do simple ink washes to pick out the detail but found it impossible to wipe them down without also removing the wash in the indents because the texture was so shallow. It was better after coating them with acrylics but I got my best results (see the two below) using white and black gesso.

You'd probably get much crisper detail using putty spreads as they suggest but the appeal of styrofoam is it's clean and quick and you don't clog up the rollers. Possibly a softer foam would give a better impression, (products like Foamcote would protect it afterwards, I used something similar on these samples).

I've only shown a few of the range here. The sci-fi ones - hexagonal grids, herring bone etc - only have limited appeal to me but I like the idea. In my opinion, the brick walls and cobblestone textures worked best with the wood planks being the least successful.

GreenStuff World also make that leaf punch that we were talking about recently, too, I think. Maybe not here, but I know we have a thread at Conny Schulte's HZ-Forum about that punch. I didn't know about any of their other products. These rollers are pretty cool. Thanks for sharing this!

Prost!
Brad

cheers for sharing this.

I like your experiments, the cobbles, walling and the wood plank ones look very useful !

I just ordered some other stuff I had forgotten to get from them, thanks for the reminder by posting this !

Paul

This looks the dogs swingers if you ask me

Had a good look , it all looks good apart from Dutch bricks , one thing for sure it certainly ain't flemish bond