I made these fields with Saga games in mind, but they could be used in any historical setting and maybe even in fantasy scenarios. They were simplicity itself to construct, made from a very cheap door mat, the cheaper (and thus thinner) the better. If you live in the UK and have a Wilkinsons nearby, a single mat will cost you the grand sum of 88p. A brown mat would be ideal, but I had to buy a grey one, it was either that or blue.
The mat has a backing of rubber/felt and is easy to cut into smaller sections with scissors. Then I quickly added some brown, cheap craft paints from my "terrain box" - full of bottles of discounted acrylic paints I use on most of my scenery. Freshly ploughed field done. Yes, the furrows are precise and straight, unlikely in the dark ages. And yes, the unplanted fields do just look like bits of carpet when viewed like this, but you have to imagine them with hedges, huts and maybe a few cattle roaming around.
Some of the fields I painted over the tops of the furrows with pva glue and then sprinkled with various colours of flock, to represent different crops. It's obviously early spring and they are just sprouting, or late autumn and they are freshly cut. When I turned over the mats and tapped off the excess, the flock stuck in the depressions, possibly because the paint was still tacky or maybe it just gets lodged in the fibres. The simple solution I found was to use the stick end of the brush to run down in the deeper areas, to remove most of the excess. One nice side effect of this process is that some of the fibres stand up and with the flock look like tiny plants, a bit too tiny for my camera to capture but you can see that they make a pretty decent impression of crops in fields.
One door mat made all these fields, enough to sustain a small hamlet I reckon. There's certainly more than enough here for a typical game of Saga. Now I just have to make a few hedges and other boundary markers to give them a little more polish. This is my complete collection of wooden boundary markers from my Warhammer collection, I need lots more so another cheap solution is required. I have an idea involving another door mat, hopefully that will yield results in the near future.
