Starting on the rivers…

Having finished painting the buildings, I’ve now (finally) started on making some rivers – this will hopefully lead to Dave’s British Paras trying to seize a bridge or two in our Chain of Command games!

I had a look around the internet, and had a read of The Wargames Compendium (Henry has written some great stuff on making scenery) and an old Games Workshop book on terrain making. The method I’m trying is inspired by these articles, but also has some of my own ideas.

I decided not to make ‘wavy’ edged rivers – probably lazy, but I didn’t fancy the extra cutting! The first thing was to sort out how wide I wanted my rivers, and then order the basing. I ended up working out the width of the rivers based on the bridges I had. For the small river, I was using a single span MDF bridge (from Warbases), whilst for the larger river I had a larger resin bridge from Peter Pig. The small river was 75mm wide, and the large river 150mm wide. I used lengths of 3mm thick MDF, either 150mm, 210mm or 300mm long

First off, I marked the MDF boards off, ensuring that each edge had a mark 10mm wide

Then I added ready-mixed filler on each side, to form the river banks

I created some bends – 30, 45 & 60 degrees (two of each)

Then I undercoated the bed of the river in black, ready for main colour.

Finally, I experimented with some river colours – this doesn’t look too bad.
Next up is to paint all the rivers, sand and paint the river banks, before adding the varnish…