Wednesday Workbench 26 August

I'm sure that you have been expecting me to post pics of the finished marsh terrain pieces for a couple of days, but they aren't quite finished. It took until Monday evening for the gloss Mod Podge to fully dry (I should have built it up in thin layers rather than doing a deep pour) and it had shrunk somewhat and the surface wasn't flat but followed the undulations of the texture underneath. So I decided to add a second pour (with some ink mixed in) to correct that.

Yesterday morning I checked and it had dried, but the surface was still undulating. I decided to add static grass anyway, but went a bit heavy with the first pass of green stuff which meant that there wasn't much free PVA for the second pass of "patchy" grass to stick to. Once that had dried, I still wasn't happy with the water surface and was also not happy with the flocking so I decided to start on some more pieces to replace them. I cut some more 2mm blue foam to size and glued that to MDF terrain bases and left them to cure overnight.

This morning I used the hot-wire cutter to trim and bevel the foam. I then created depressions for the water effects by rubbing the rounded handles of some scissors over the patches of the foam to compress it. The foam was then scuffed up with a scrubbing brush and the MDF underside and the foam on top were base-coated with Nutmeg Spice paint. The depressions then got painted with raw umber craft paint, with a thin wash of Army Painter Dark Tone added to darken the deepest parts.

Once the wash was dry, I mixed a few drops of olive green ink into some Vallejo water effects and added it to the depressions on the new pieces. Realising that that would also sort out the water surface problem with the original pieces, I mixed up some more, tinted with AP Strong tone wash, and added it to those.

If the water effects have dried tomorrow, I will build up the "land" parts with some acrylic caulk, add texture paste and paint it. Flocking the second batch with static grass will probably need to wait until Friday.