Homemade (Hex) Space Mat

...Alternate title: "My Aching Back"

A year ago I went to the local fabric store and made a great find.  The clearance bin held all sorts of upholstery vinyl for cheap.  I got 5 yards of black vinyl for $3.00/yard (US).  The surface takes acrylic paint wonderfully, yet dirt wipes clean off it.  It also has a sort of rubberized backing that makes it nice and heavy, very durable.

  I loaded some cheap Walmart white acrylic paint on an old toothbrush and pulled the bristles back, flicking paint all over the mat and creating a convincing star field.  I hand painted planets and stars with the results shown below, and for $7.50 I had an awesome space mat.

Space Mat

My homebrew War In Space rules uses rulers, but I want to try hex-based rules.  So even though I'm proud of my space mat and loathe to ruin it, I decided to paint some hexes on it.  First I needed some guides.

I noticed the bottoms of Dixie cups are 49mm across, and since I designed my game for 5cm increments this is near-perfect.  So I grabbed a bunch of cups and filled the little recess in the bottom with water-putty.

My poor girlfriend puts up with this weirdness

 After 20 or so hours of setting, I squeezed the cups gently and pulled out 19 discs with perfectly smooth bottoms and identical diameters: essential if I wanted to use circle packing to generate a hex pattern.

Use this technique for round bases of any type

 I packed the discs together flush against one edge of the space mat and then mixed up some true navy blue, crimson and white acrylic paint.  I took a sharpened chopstick and dabbed the tip into my paint well, then made all sorts of tiny dots in the spaces between the circles.  The pictures below make the hex pattern seem very bright.  The brightness is an artifact of the camera flash; actually the hex pattern is fairly subdued.  The hexes can be counted from a meter or so away, but do not cover up the star field too much.

Cheap but tedious

 The problem with this method is that I'm still not finished.  I'm probably less than a quarter of the way done and I've been at it for hours.  The inaugural battle of my solo space campaign, which playtests my hex variant rules, will have to wait.  There's a great post on SGN that shows a cost comparison for commercial space mats.  The cheapest runs about $0.0125 per square inch and the average price about double that at $0.025.  At 54 by 90 inches with a total cost of less than $12.00, my mat is incredibly cheap compared to the commercial versions.  Of course, I'll need the money I save for medical care; my poor back aches from bending over the table while I paint dots and move discs.

And for no reason other than I love this design, here's an old unpainted ship I built back in May.  My first set of pictures sucked.  Today however, I had some good sunlight for photos and wanted to show what this baby truly looks like in some natural light.  I think I'll experiment with using this gray primer as the "base" coat and just paint little highlights like insignia and portholes on the ship.