Water features have a major modelmaking advantage over roads: they don’t have major changes in level or have to negotiate hills, unless you’re modelling the Nile cataracts or something similar.
PROJECT 3: A Simple River Section
MATERIALS
The material used for your river depends on how much effort you want to put in, which in turn is influenced by how much use they will get. If it’s only occasional use, or if you’re undecided on your future water feature requirement, the simplest option is to use some suitably coloured thick felt or fleece. Fleece is preferable because it has less tendency to crease.
Another material that is commonly used as a basis for water features (and also roads) is butyl rubber. It’s available in various grades and is intended for use as pond linings or damp course membranes. However, for this particular project I decided to try a different material: vinyl floor tiles.
CONSTRUCTION
It’s relatively simple to create straight lengths of river or canal: just mark it out and cut a straight line. However, meandering rivers or river bends are a little more involved. For my rivers I use a pair of callipers set to the appropriate width, and trace the shape of my river section onto the tile (Figure 104).
Obviously, if you have already made or bought some bridges, make sure that you don’t make your river sections too wide; but ideally follow nature by making your rivers first and then your bridges.
Use a blue, dark green or brown tile depending on the type of water represented, and if the flow is to be fast moving you can simulate this by lightly painting or airbrushing thin streaks of white following the shape of the river.
You may also decide to suggest a river bank (Figure 105). My technique is to just run a line of PVA glue along the edges of the vinyl tile and sprinkle on static grass or flock which prevents a sudden change from land to water and, if the static grass or flock matches the surrounding terrain, will help to blend the river in too. One advantage of representing the banks with just a line of glue and some static grass is that it keeps the height relatively shallow, so you can turn the tile over, brush on PVA glue, sprinkle on fine sand, paint it and you have a scenery piece that is a river section on one side and a road on the other. Making a pond follows the same basic procedure (Figure 106).
Figure 105: A river section with bank.
Figure 107: Olustee. (Battlegroup South)
The guys from Battlegroup South adopted a different technique for representing water. For their Olustee American Civil War game (Figure 107), they cut sheets of acrylic, painted one side dark brown, and once it was completely dried, turned it over and added static grass to create banks and islands.
If you want to represent a marshy area, choose a dark brown or green tile and add patches of static grass or lichen to represent weeds and other vegetation. For added effect you can incorporate random items that failed to sink completely below the surface, such as branches or even a body!
Whether you use a length of blue felt, a floor tile or a ready-made terrain and river tile, you can further enhance the overall effect by gluing some bristles from a garden broom to a piece of clear acetate (such as is used for packaging figures), to represent clumps of reeds (Figure 108).
Figure 108: Broom bristles glued to clear acetate to represent reeds.