Battle Boards and Scatter Terrain

On to the angel. I originally bought the Reaper angel to teach the missus how to paint hair, feathers, and robes, all in one go. Needless to say, that plan went south. But the model was ideal for my fountain, and as luck would have it, the hands were perfectly placed to hold an amphora, which was made from Milliput, a paper clip, and a GW high elf bit. The pedestal is a thread spool nicked from my partner’s sewing room.

Water Effects

My original intent was to look for a cheaper alternative to Woodland Scenics Realistic Water (hereafter WSRW) for the pool itself, but in the end, that’s what I went with. I picked up some two-part five minute epoxy syringes, but there was far less in them than I thought there would be. I injected one into the fountain and it barely covered the bottom… grrr.

My next ill-conceived venture involved casting resin, which was marginally cheaper than WSRW. I poured about ¼” of the stuff into the fountain and left it for a day… then two… then three. The smell left us higher than kites – and it never did set. No one told us we needed to mix in a catalyst… duh. It also eats foam. I finally just bit the bullet and poured ¼” of WSRW over it.

I tinted the WSRW with a drop of blue ink (ink will tint the water, but leave it transparent, while a drop of paint will make it murky). After 24 hours it was mostly set, so I dumped in some leaves made with the Green Stuff leaf cutter. I did a final ¼” clear pour of WSRW and added more leaves so that it would look like they were dispersed throughout the water column.

The stream from the amphora was made with half a dozen bits of fishing line stuck together at one end with Superglue and stuffed into the amphora (fiddly bits profanity alert). The other ends were splayed and arced into the water, then glued to the surface. I mixed up one of the syringes of five minute epoxy, and applied it to the strands with a Kamikaze brush.

I made emanating waves with Woodland Scenics Water Effects, which starts life as a white paste, but dries transparent. It also has a 24-hour set time, so can be sculpted into ripples and waves without the manic frenzy of a five-minute epoxy. If you’re good with a glue gun, you can also sculpt the transparent goop into waves, but you’ll have even less time to mold it into something approaching a wave.

You can use a dry brush or stipple brush to apply white foam to the crests of the waves, but you’ll need to paint on WSRW or another glossy finish afterward.

Finally, I added four wedding cake pillars to the back of the fountain, and placed statues produced and donated by a friend at Legions IV Hire in Winnipeg. The lintels were made from scrap ½” polystyrene from a previous project.

I’ve glossed over a lot of the processes used in this first scatter terrain piece, but I’ll cover them in next week’s instalment where I build the first copse, with an enchanted statue nestled in its depths.