Painting a Realm of Battle Board

So I have acquired a Citadel Realm of Battle Gameboard (lets just call it the RoB for ease from now on) from Games Workshop along with the two extension tiles, now I am not going to get into any kind of debate about its price or if its easier to build your own. Whilst its price certainly put me off, I paid nothing for this so I am happy, and the girls I live with said if I built my own board it had to be easily storable, and well the RoB is very easily storable.
Anyway this is how I have been doing mine, so lets start with materials.

So I have the Citadel Scenery Painting Pack, which is no longer listed for sale on the UK site, which is a shame, and that comes with 400ml tub of brown paint, one 40ml pot of ochre paint, one 200g bag of Scorched Grass, one 25g bag of Static Grass, one 118 ml tub of PVA glue and one 2" scenery brush. I also have some spray paint, now I am not a rich man, so the Citadel Chaos Black spray is beyond my means so I buy my sprays from Poundland, now in all fairness its actually pretty good paint, and it goes quite far for what you pay. Also from Poundland was a mini roller with a tray, and from Games Workshop some paints for the infamous skull pits, I have Rakarth Flesh, Ushabti Bone, White Scar and Agrax Earthshade, and I also have some Game Inks form Vallejo, Black and Brown. I also have a collection of odd brushes from my tool box that are perfect for this project.
So to prepare I gave the boards a wash with some washing up liquid to make sure the surface was perfectly clean for the paint going on, but my major concern is those damn skull pits, well I am not that opposed to them, but what is annoying me is that they are sculpted so they are laying on a flat surface in the pit.

So I decided to deal with this by filling the gaps with some sand, so it appears as if the skulls are sort of emerging from the ground rather than laying on a flat surface. So I start by painting some PVA glue into the gaps, and even obscuring some of the skulls to try and give it a more natural organic feel, well as natural and organic as a pit of skulls can be.

I followed this up with my basing mix with is a mixture of bird sand and bird grit with some cat littler (unused obviously), though i did sift it to keep out the bigger lumps of grit and litter.

Once I did this, I just tapped it to get he excess off and reveal a pit of skulls lying on sand, and well here is the result.

So I leave this to dry overnight and then the next day I undercoat the boards using the Poundland black spray paint, now this gives some pretty decent coverage in my opinion, not too thick and quite even, from one can you get one board fully done and about 75% of another one done.

Here is a close up of the skull pits.

So once that's done on areas where its pretty rocky, such as the roads and cliffs, I use a grey primer to get a dark grey undercoat on for these areas.

So once that's done I use the roller to get some of the brown paint on, now I didn’t actually take photos of the intermittent stages of the next few steps here but here is the end result of the brown, which took two coats.

My next step was to give the brown an ink wash using the black and brown inks, at a ratio of 1 part black to 3 parts brown mixed 50/50 with water. The prupose of this is to really fill in the shadows and give it a nice dark tone.

So I leave this to dry overnight and I wake up to this.

Which is now ready for some drybrushing, again, I forgot to take some photos of each stage, but I have to do some corrections to the rocky areas so I will upload some photos in my next entry.
I have no idea if this will turn out any good, but hey I have given it my best shot.

Update

Here is part two!