The official combat mats are great but for the western front the lack of no-mans land is a bit of a drawback.
Lugburz has posted up a great image for no-mans land in the following post
http://www.wingsofwar.org/forums/sho...ain-free-files
My thanks to Lugburz for posting up such a great image.
I thought wouldn't it be great to combine the no-mans land image with the official mats but I wanted to do it on the cheap. So, I purchased A4 Matt Vinyl Self Adhesive Sticker Paper from Paper Photo Direct.
I created a set of A4 images and printed them onto the Vinyl A4 sheets using an inkjet printer with borderless printing enabled.
I created a funky foam mat by sticking together 2 sheets of A3 foam and 1 sheet of A4. Green is recommended as the edges don't show up as much. Then the printed out Vinyl sheets are stuck onto the Funky foam mat. This creates a mat 12 inches wide.
One thing to note is that the funky foam sheets are not necessarily cut straight - so make sure you have a straight edge before sticking on the vinyl sheets. After the sheets are stuck on, cut off the excess with scissors - the foam cuts really easy.
I used other vinyl sheets, also, to print out a few balloon images and clouds.
The great thing about this technique is that it's cheap to create extra mats - say for an airfield or canal or whatever.
2 Sheets of A3 funky foam plus 1 sheet of A4 cost around £3
40 sheets of vinyl A4 cost me around £22 including delivery. It takes 5 sheets to make the combat mat.
PS. Please note the two big combat mats on either side of the no-man's lands are the official Ares combat mats. I did not make these but purchased them. I would not recommend making a huge combat mat printing A4 sheets as it take too much work. I just made the no-mans land in the middle. It might be possible to make a large combat mat with A3 funky foam taped together.
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