Greetings from the Aether!
It's been a minute since my last entry, so I thought I'd take a moment and talk about this blasted water terrain I've been working on.
See, many years ago it occurred to me that to be more realistic we'd need some water type terrain on the board. It was a lot harder to do model water then, most of what I found involved making a resin and doing some other strange rituals and black voodoo over the piece to make it look correct. I decided to take an easier route.
We made some marshes from hardboard by painting some "water" on the surface. It was just blue with a little white thrown in for movement effect, courtesy old Bill the Neiman way off back in the Brook. We put some gloss coat on it, flocked around it and called it done. We had two marshes for the games!!
That lasted for a while, but those pieces took a hell of a beating and I moved them into a special "this terrain will eventually be reworked to look good like the rest of our stuff should eventually look" box. They have languished there for about a year, and whenever someone opened that box to put the wooden ziggurat or the unfinished and dusty old gloss-swamps on the board I'd cringe. Embarrassing. They're gonna see my swamps...
Anyhoo, I saw all kinds of stuff online about new kinds of model water effects, especially after good old Games Workshop produced their Water Effects bottle. I couldn't ever get ahold of one, and after about a year of talking about it I finally bought at twenty dollar bottle of Water Effects from Woodland Scenics. Great huh? A week for shipping and I got out those old swamps, dusted them off, preened the dog hairs out of the flock with tweezers and re-foliaged the foliage.
Then totally failed. You see, Woodland Scenics Water Effects is absolutely nothing like Games Workshop Water Effects. I was too silly to realize that it wasn't what I had seen (though I knew something was wrong) and tried to use it on one of the swamp pieces...
It didn't work out too well. I was discouraged at my own silliness for a fortnight, then sprung another twenty on Woodland Scenics Realistic Water. Which is what I thought their Water Effects was. That is, Woodland Scenics Realistic Water is much like Games Workshop Water Effects.
So what are Woodland Scenics Water Effects for? Well, a whole crapload of stuff you can't use Realistic Water or GW Water Effects for. Like an adhesive for things beneath the water, ripples, eddies, current, rapids, splash or even waterfalls. I'm gonna experiment on these in my next pieces, but I should tell you about the new swamp and mire terrain!
Sorry for the poor photo, I was in a hurry. These two pieces are the old swamp pieces, remade into these new swamps, with actual water type stuff instead of gloss! However, I was new at using the Realistic Water, and I got the coat too thin I think.
This mire piece was easier, and I did a better layer of the Realistic Water. A few imperfections due to rogue flock particles, but it's minutiae. Then again, as a judge on this I'm biased. This mire will be impassable terrain with clear LOS.
Next time we get a game together, put these on the board and get your feet wet!
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