DIY: How to make a GUILD BALL mat - A step-by-step guide

This article is going to show you, step-by-step, how to make a sweet, textured, rollable mat for your favourite mob soccer game: Guild Ball!

The materials you will need: 

-3x3 cloth surface. Felt, or any cheap but durable cloth will do.

-At least 2 tubes of Acrylic caulking (and a caulking gun will be helpful)

-A flat tool to spread acrylic. I used an ice scraper.

-A sponge

-Paint

-Painters tape

-White spray paint, and whatever paints you want your surface colour to be

-A print-out of the Guild Ball logo

-Precision knife

Step 1- The first step is to spread the caulking all around the mat. You can apply liberally. As stated before, it will probably take at least 2 tubes.



Step 2- Use the flat surface tool to spread the globs of caulking around, evenly on the mat. You ideally want the whole mat to look white.

Step 3- Once the whole surface is covered, take the sponge and just dab the surface all over. The point of this is to get texture on the mat. It will look like grass or rough ground.

Step 4- Paint the mat in your desired colour. The most obvious colour would be green, but really, whatever terrain you like, that is what you can paint. Important note: try to use THREE (3) colours.                                                         

So, for this green pitch, get a Dark Green, a lighter green, and yellow. Paint the whole surface with the darkest colour first. Once it dries, lightly brush (think drybrushing) the lighter green over most of the mat. Once that dries, use the yellow and sparingly drybrush parts of the mat. This will make the whole mat look better.




Step 5- Now, to truly turn this mat into a GUILD BALL pitch, you need to add the details!
Take the print-out of the Guild Ball logo, and start cutting out the black parts. This will essentially become a stencil for you to use as the main focal point of the mat.

Step 6- Next, you are going to use the painters tape and block off parts of the mat to make it easy to spray paint on the white lines of the pitch.

This is probably the most work-intensive part of the whole project, but it's not hard.

You need several specific measurements:

-Tape at the 10-inch mark to mark the deployment zone. You will then put a second piece of tape just below that tape, leaving a gap to be as thick as you want the line to be.


-Tape the stencil on the center of the mat, and tape off the half-way line (18 inches). Helpful tip: the stencil may flop around later when we spray paint it, so you may want to roll up tiny pieces of tape and tape down the stencil. Don't worry too much about taping EVERYTHING. No matter what you do, it wont be perfect. We just want it to not be too messy.

 -Tape on the 6-inch mark to represent the goal line. This part isn't really important, but it will help complete the look of the field.

Once again, a second piece of tape just below that one with a gap in between as wide as you want the line to appear on the pitch.

To add even more flair, you can put smaller pieces of tape every inch or so to make it a dotted line!


 

 Step 7- Time to spray the exposed areas between the tape, and spray the stencil.

Step 8- You may notice the lines have bled out a bit. It's natural. So, we are going to manually touch up the over-spray and blurred lines.

Step 9- Another optional part, but it still completes the look of the pitch. Get a large circle to mark as the actual Goal circle.

We are now done the Guild Ball pitch!

The total material cost of this sweet mat (Canadian):
-Felt: $3-7.
-2 tubes of caulking: $5.00
-3 paints from the dollar store: $3.75

The other stuff, I had laying around. As miniature gamers, you probably also have white primer at home, and most people have painters tape at home. That stuff is inexpensive too.

TOTAL COST TO MAKE MAT: $11.75!



I hope you enjoyed this post, and found the guide useful. I have already made 4 different mats this way, and they are all a little different and unique. If you want to go for a more "used" look on the pitch, you can intentionally leave gaps in the caulking and then glue sand into the patches.

Happy Guild Balling on your sweet new pitch!

And thank you Steam Forged Games for making a game that I love to share!

-aY