Building a Modular Gaming Table - Part 5/Day 2 - First River

I start the day with strong doubts if I will be able to swallow what I have bitten off. Is this too big for me? I needed very much time to make the first board. And will they look good? Nonetheless I am going to make rivers today.

The board from yesterday with the first river pieces. We can see my system here: the wood ends a little bit before the river so that I can model an embankment that goes down to the point where the water begins. The corners have a width of 5 cm and I added 2 for the embankment. So the river is always 11 cm wide and every side of it ends 7 cm away from the corner.

Cardboard to fill the empty space ....

... and the wood filler applied. 

Seen from the side. The wooden frame and the filler.

The stuff dries in an hour or so. OK, more or less. Dry enough to be painted brown and dry brushed with ocher. The blue color is only a background, a kind of primer for the painted water. 

A warning for the new or younger modeler because I sometimes read very strange ideas on the web: For big surfaces like this use paints from the hardware store sold in bigger containers, not model colors. That would be terrible expensive and not very practically. Brown and ocher here are tinting colors that are used for changing white wall paint into other colors. The blue is water soluble acrylic paint.

And, because everything dries so fast I can begin mounting the grass mats to the boards.

A line of wood glue for the loose grass.

One final river board. The water is painted with the following Army Painter colors : Dark Sky (dark blue), Angel green (dark green) and a touch of Ultramarine Blue here an there. I used a cheap one inch brush for this task, smaller ones would produce smaller lines and that does not look right on a bigger surface.

What Have I learned today:

• The system seems to work and now I know the work steps.
  
  
• The idea that I can do the whole project in one week or so seems to be very far away now. As always, nobody can say how much time a project really needs.
  
  
• The boundaries of the grass mat are still visible when I have applied the loose grass. This results from the fact that the grass on the mat stands upright while my loose grass is only scattered over the glue and of course does not stand up