Stone Walls Do Not A Prison Make....

.....but they work just fine as field boundaries.

 

the river is on the bottom edge of the picture, the two narrow channels are irrigation canals

 (made just wide enough to admit one of Zhodani Commando's figure bases)

       While I am still on fire for building terrain I thought that it would be a good idea to get moving on the second terrain panel of the Afghan Village project. This panel is designed to join any of three of it's sides to the panel with the village see this link for a background on the design idea. It represents a fertile low-lying area with access to a river and some irrigation canals. Unlike Americans the Afghans have the sense to build their towns on rocky hillsides and grow crops in the fertile flat lands; perhaps because they have so little fertile land.

 

 

my hills aren't quite as high

       Finding it nearly impossible to glue the aquarium gravel together (the super glue and pebbles stuck on my fingers was worth a fair amount of swearing!) I gave up on that approach. With the whole world on lock-down I couldn't go to my neighborhood garden center and buy a bucket of unsorted gravel (which would still have had the gluing issue anyways) I decided to make the rocks myself. Providentially I had purchased a large block of old-fashioned gray modelling clay for a project with the granddaughter just before the world ended, I got this out and started rolling up little tiny boulders and sticking them down onto the board. This is exactly as mind-numbingly boring as it sounds, but after a foot or so of wall it becomes like a Zen meditation thing and the time just passes.

 

the clay is very sticky while wet but adheres to nothing once dry, thus a big slobbery

trail of Titebond is needed to ensure that the walls remain attached to the terrain panel

 

I started with a baseball sized chunk of clay and pulled off a bit at a time,

the aim was to keep the "boulders" smaller than a pea

 

once the clay has dried I will paint over it with a thinned coat of glue

 

water effects will be added later so I had to be sure that my 

canal walls were high enough to hold the resin while it dried

 

the ends of the canal jut out into the river to help

 direct the flow of water during the dry season

 

this being the outside curve of the river meant that this is the eroding bank,

sorry kids, no beach just gravel and rocks

the shore had to reach the edge of the board at full height

 on both ends to be sure to contain the water-effect resin

 

the shore was made by pressing a thin strip of clay into a bead of glue and 

then adding a taper, as this was setting I brushed another coat of thinned 

glue over the clay and added the True Grit mix and pressed it into the damp clay