They say that everyone knows the best way to prime MDF terrain is with a rattle can. Because MDF is water-absorbent and lacquers fill in better. But what if you live in an apartment or other space that is not conducive to rattle can spraying (like me)? Will primers fill in all that precision laser etched detail? Are your water-based paints gonna warp the material of those miniature buildings and barricades? What if we sealed the MDF first in a matte or gloss clear coat? Or does any of this nonsense matter at all?

Today we gonna find out, ‘cause not only am I’m new to MDF terrain, but I, ironically, have quite a bit of it buried in the Pile of Opportunity. And also, I like to share. 

[intro]

Welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we’re not embarrassed to be noobs and try out new things. I’m Ignatius and you’re you and we’re on this tabletop hobby journey together. 

So, as I said, I’m new to the whole laser-cut MDF terrain scene. There’s a ton of it out there and a few years ago, I imported some rather … large collections of MDF terrain kits from England and Australia. Specifically from TT Combat and Knights of Dice. And on top of that, I’ve already built all the kits. That’s right. Mostly while watching Season Two of Critical Role. Yeah, I’ve had these things for a while. Anyway, the point here is that I have a ton of miniature buildings to paint up and I’ve never painted a lick of MDF.

I’ve chosen the most basic, simple, almost throw-away model I have in my collection to run today’s tests on. Actually, this entire video production is a test for me – I’ve never produced a “work desk slash tutorial” type of video before and the process definitely has a learning curve to it. So I’ve tried my best and I’ve learned quite a bit about the actual shooting side of things, so hopefully in the future I’ll get better at making this type of content.

That all said, when looking at this MDF terrain, the first thing I notice is how fine the detail is on these things. I was kinda worried that primer and paint might fill in all this stuff, and I’ve heard from various sources online that detail could in fact be lost depending on the type of paint or primer you use. The MDF itself has a tooth to it that creates this subtle texture and I didn’t know what to expect putting paint over that either.  

Real quick, for those of you that wanna know, MDF stands for Medium Density Fibreboard. It’s made by breaking down hard or softwood into fine particles, and then re-combining those particles with wax and a resin binder to create a workable end material. Terrain kits are made out of pretty thin sheets of this stuff, thin enough that prosumer-grade lasers can cut right through it. And also etch in all these tiny details. And the details are actually really cool and I definitely didn’t wanna lose any of that if possible.

I glued up the kits with wood glue and as you can see, the parts don’t always go together as easily as you’d hope and I didn’t always take the time to be super-precise. You could put a lot of work into these kits to make really tight, finished display pieces out of them, like sanding and filling the flat dovetail joints, et cetera. But, really, we’re tabletop hobbyists – who’s got time for that? We wanna role some dice!

All right, enough of my excuses, let’s get on with it. Keep in mind this is just a series of tests and I’m not finishing the model up for this video – we just wanna see how the different primer techniques work. I’ll most likely repaint this entire model at some point to actually finish it up.

I wanna try out five specific techniques:

One, airbrushing acrylic primer. Here I’m gonna use Stynylrez gray. Cause that’s what I got. I like this primer, I haven’t tried Vallejo or ProAcryl, or some of the other brands, maybe I’ll try something new after I use all this stuff up. 

Two, airbrushing matte varnish followed by primer. Here I’ll use Vallejo’s Mecha flat varnish. I seal my minis with this stuff all the time.

Three, airbrushing gloss varnish followed by matte varnish followed by primer. I’m sure this sounds ridiculous. The idea with this one is that gloss varnish is typically much more durable and protective than matte varnish and I’m wondering if it might seal the MDF better than just matte varnish on it’s own. The matte will go over the gloss to bring back some tooth for the primer to bite into.

Four, hand painting on a coat of Modpodge and paint mix. I’m planning to use acrylic inks to tint the modpodge – spoiler: that doesn’t go well, so I end up using, well, you’ll see.

and Five, just airbrushing paint right onto the MDF.

I’m using one of the cheapest airbrushes available, the classic $30 Masters G233, cause that’s the only airbrush I own. And I use it for two things: priming miniatures and clear coating them after they’re painted. Here’s an interesting detail about that airbrush: apparently Iwata failed to protect it’s patent on it’s general internal airbrush design at some point and so this brush right here is almost an identical copy of the Iwata HP-C. Now it’s parts quality and machining are almost definitely not up to par with an Iwata’s but still, I think that’s funny. Anyway, this brush is what I call a beater, you can push a lotta crap through it and if it jams up beyond repair, just order a new one. All that said, I do clean this thing after each use and it’s worked fine for me for years. I’ve only ever used the largest needle for paint volume, but one day I wanna try the smaller needles and see if this thing can actually do any kind of detail work. 

And that said, let me declare “I declare” I am not savvy with airbrush work. Dumping primer on a model is one thing, doing actual artistic paintwork with an airbrush is definitely another.

All right, first thing I did was label each wall with the technique I planned to use on it so I could keep track after the primer and paint went on. I started out with the gloss varnish, since it’s the lowest level of application. I use a bit of airbrush thinner or flow improver with the clear varnishes, it just seems to help stop clogging in the brush. I just use a bit, I don’t thin the varnish nearly as much as I would actual paint.

After cleaning the gloss out of the brush, I gave the gloss coat a bit of time to dry and then I put down the matte coat over the gloss … and over the raw MDF on this face of the building.

Then it was time for the gray primer and I was instantly surprised by what happened. It seemed to highlight the surface details really well. Didn’t seem to fill in anything. The MDF does seem to soak up a bit of the primer but nothing like I was led to believe was gonna happen. I sprayed a pretty liberal amount of primer just to see what it did. To be honest, the primer going right over the MDF itself seems to work great.

So onto the ModPodge. As you can see, the acrylic inks reacted … weird. It’s like the inks congealed into colored sand or something. My inks are fairly old, I guess, I mean I don’t know what qualifies as old for artist’s inks, they’re a few years old for sure, but as you can see here I put some on the paper just to see if there were chunks or anything but it looked fine. It’s just the ModPodge looks like cream of wheat cereal or something. So, craft paint to the rescue! This is typically what I put into the ModPodge for base coating terrain foam pieces, I just thought the inks would be cool to use. Apparently not. Anyway, I slapped the tinted ModPodge down kinda like normal, maybe a “little” thinner than I would have on foam pieces, but I just wanted to see what it would do to the detail etched into the MDF. As you can see, the ModPodge is not great at going on smooth, which is typically fine for rougher, organic ground-type terrain. 

All right, let’s take a look at the base coat results. The ModPodge dried as expected, little bit gloopy, got some nice runs in there, has that kinda smooth, sealed finish. Not sure what it’s done to the details yet, we’ll see with paint on top of it. The straight primer side looks awesome. The MDF still has a relatively rough texture but in scale it’s actually very fine. The details are sharp and there doesn’t seem to be any filling of the etched lines anywhere. The lines in the roof are particularly shallow but they show up with no problem. 

Now the side with matte varnish under the primer looks a tiny bit rougher but it’s barely perceptible. It does feel … hardier? I guess is the word. Visually it just seems to have a bit more of that micro-stucco look – again, barely perceptible. The double varnished side, with gloss under the matte coat and primer on top, has an even more pronounced micro-stucco look and feel. But again, this isn’t something that’s gonna be noticeable on the tabletop at all. It’s very subtle, but you know it is there. Still, all that said, the details remained crisp.

Okay, now for some paint. I’m trying out a line I’ve never used before, some Army Painter airbrush paints. I don’t like regular Army Painter paints, but I do like their washes. Of course, right? But this brand of airbrush paints is probably the most economical line of airbrush paints on the market. I got a small selection of colors I thought I’d make use of in terrain painting. I started out using a fairly dark brown but it ended up being very close to the primer color so I switched to a lighter brown for better contrast – you know, so we can actually see the paint going on. 

Side note about airbrush paints, I understand that these are just convenience purchases, obviously you can thin down any paint and shove it through an airbrush. But you know we all like to try out new tools and paints and whatever else we can spend our hard earned ducats on in this hobby! It’s an affliction, leave us alone!  You can see my expert airbrushing skills on full display here, those overcharged air pressure splatters are completely intentional and artfully placed. Don’t argue with the artist. 

Now just to see what it’s like I thought I’d slap some craft paint over the roof since that’s the typical technique I use for sort of basing organic terrain features. Just mixing some in here and there, bit of streaking to discolor the roof, maybe go for a mossy sorta thing, simple, fast and definitely not how I would approach an actual terrain piece like this. Rough, slapdash organic techniques like this can totally work – if you’re a better artist than I, but I can already tell I’m gonna wanna do some full-on paint jobs on these buildings, using the airbrush for the base coats and then of course some actual try-hard dry brushing (as opposed to this nonsense you see here, where I’m just knocking paint around to see what the MDF is like). The texture is so fine on this model that haphazard dry brushing like this isn’t gonna pick out a lot of detail because the detail just isn’t pronounced enough for that kinda thing. 

Oh yeah, here’s just putting some paint directly on the MDF and to be honest, it seems to work just fine. I’ve said “fine” a lot in this video and it’s starting to bother me. The material does soak up a bit of paint, so two or three coats are probably necessary, but in the end, this could work just fine – good lord! 

I imagine for myself though I’ll be going with the primer coat and then matte sealing a completed paint job – probably with gloss and then matte over that. To really kick in the durability of terrain like this, I would prefer to hard coat the pieces with industrial rattle can varnish because those products are typically much stronger than this hobby acrylic stuff, but as I mentioned, I’m just not in a place where I can easily make use of rattle cans. 

You ever spray lacquer in your apartment? Yeah that … that’s a mistake.

All right, so the overall end results and my opinions on these tests. TLDR – which I guess this should have gone at the beginning so you didn’t have to skip through this entire video … All right, TLDR, my favorite technique and the one I’ll go with in the future is just laying down primer and then paint with an airbrush. Weathering, washes and details can go on with regular brushes after that. The sides with the matte and the gloss plus matte undercoats do seem to be a tick “harder”, they feel a bit more solid or protected. That’s to be expected, but I don’t think the time and expense of laying down those sealing layers is really worth it in the long run. The paint and primer coat seems hardy enough and nothing rubs off when I give it a good scrub. 

All in all this has been a pretty worthwhile experiment for me – now I know what the details will look like after paint, which was the thing I was most interested in. And I’m actually surprised at how well the details hold up, even with that thick-ass ModPodge the details are still mostly there. 

All right, that wraps it up. For me a success, for you probably a boring video that needed the TLDR at the beginning and not the end. But hopefully and if you live in a space where you can’t rattle can and you’ve got a cheap airbrush, and you haven’t worked with MDF terrain kits before – that’s a lotta caveats – maybe this information has helped a little bit. 

These terrain kits are actually really cool. This one is very very simple in detail. I’ve got plenty of others that are really nice.

All right, well … go paint something! See ya!