Discovery: Birchwood painting panels

[Evil Eye]

I've recently been on a kick building a (non-40K related) diorama, and had been looking for a good source of lightweight but strong material to use as the base for it. My previous attempts at this sort of thing were made from MDF (warps horribly, quite heavy) and foamboard (warps even more horribly, rather fragile), neither of which worked terribly well.

 

However! I recently made a rather nifty discovery at my local city's art shop, in the form of "painting panels"- essentially pre-assembled canvases, with the painting surface made from birchwood. These are available in standard British paper sizes- A4, A3 etc (though local equivalents may be in different sizes)- and are absolutely perfect for this purpose. They're quite strong, the assembly (a flat wooden panel affixed to a sturdy frame) should prevent any warping, they're decently lightweight without being "blows away from a sneeze" and whilst not dirt cheap, they're not megabucks either. Also, being meant for applying paint to in the first place, they shouldn't be adversely affected by glue, primer, paint or other such materials being applied to them.

 

Anyway, whilst obviously the smaller ones are great for dioramas, they also sell them at bigger sizes, notably A2 and A1. It occurred to me, these would be absolutely fantastic for making gaming boards (or sections thereof) from. As mentioned they're strong, light and deformation-resistant, and because they're made to standard paper sizes, not only will planning them out be super simple, but depending on the size of board you want to play on you can set them up in different combinations- and at least for fellow British frater, because they double in size with each step up, it's extremely simple to check what to buy for your needs (for example, two A3 panels will provide the same area as four A4 panels).

 

Hopefully I'm not missing anything and won't have an "oopsie!" moment later, because I think I may have struck gold here!

[Firedrake Cordova]

Interesting.  I guess they would originally have been for using oil paints on, and now also acrylic.

 

I take it plasticard wasn't suitable/available/economical.

[Evil Eye]

36 minutes ago, Firedrake Cordova said:

Interesting.  I guess they would originally have been for using oil paints on, and now also acrylic.

 

I take it plasticard wasn't suitable/available/economical.

For this purpose absolutely not suitable, as making a supporting structure for a diorama (which is, in effect, a smaller gaming board) out of styrene would have been very expensive indeed, not to mention far too weak. Most diorama/terrain modelers tend to use wood as the very base layer to the best of my knowledge, with high density XPS layered on top for landscape elements.

[Firedrake Cordova]

Fair enough! I think I had in my head an image of something somewhat smaller than what it sounds like you're making.  

[LameBeard]

It sounds like the kind of thing I’ve been looking for. I haven’t seen anything like it in hobbycraft, so where might I try?
 

At the moment I am about to use some model railway mdf that’s lazercut so you build chunky frame as well as base. Looks good and my diorama size was cheap, but gets expensive once you can’t get it through the letterbox for a battlefield size.

[Evil Eye]

1 hour ago, LameBeard said:

It sounds like the kind of thing I’ve been looking for. I haven’t seen anything like it in hobbycraft, so where might I try?
 

At the moment I am about to use some model railway mdf that’s lazercut so you build chunky frame as well as base. Looks good and my diorama size was cheap, but gets expensive once you can’t get it through the letterbox for a battlefield size.

I got mine from an independent art shop in my nearest city (Norwich Art Supplies to be exact), so I'd suggest looking in those sorts of places, be they brick and mortar or online. Look up "wooden painting panels" and you should find the sort of thing!

[Sky Potato]

Are these essentially just bits of plywood on a frame?

[Evil Eye]

On 1/17/2026 at 8:11 AM, Sky Potato said:

Are these essentially just bits of plywood on a frame?

Birchwood, not plywood, but essentially yes. Obviously if you're good at woodwork you can probably make something very similar yourself, but for convenience's sake they are quite handy.