Well, it’s been a few months now since I started building my Logar River boards for use in my Battle of Charasiab terrain lay-out. It’s been an extremely busy time for me, at work, at home, and also with an unfortunate call to serve on Jury Duty, which lasted almost three weeks. Nonetheless, I have kept working to finish this seemingly unfinishable project, and though not done yet, have managed to make some real progress.
Unfortunately I missed putting up a post on the recent 134th anniversary of Maiwand Day, during which I was down in San Diego with my two daughters who wanted to visit Comicon. We had a great time and I was able to answer a fellow hobbyist’s Second Afghan War-related question on TMP before midnight hit on July 28th (the day AFTER Maiwand Day), so at least I felt like I had done something appropriate to commemorate the day.
Right now I am in the midst of compiling one of my typical posts complete with a ton of WIP pics and some hopefully useful tutorial details concerning how I built these river boards, but it won’t be done for some time yet, and to be honest, I’m tired of waiting to show this stuff off!
So I’ve decided to cut to the chase by posting a handful of pics I took after putting the first coat of artist’s acrylic paint down onto the base of the river channel on these two 2’x2′ boards.
It’s not really the end of “The Chase”, as these boards still need some work done, as I have to do some touch-ups in places along the river’s edge, and will likely add another coat to tweek the exact mix of colors in a few spots. Then I will glue down some REEDS — courtesy of an inexpensive whisk brown bought at my local Hardware Store — along the river’s edge, and then — finally — I’ll be able to do what I’ve been looking forward to doing since I started cooking up this epic enchilada months ago: pour on several coats of clear two-part EnviroTex Lite resin. The first pour will be clear, the next two or three (each 1/8″ deep) will receive a drop of brown and possibly also a drop of green artist’s ink.
Then… I will collapse — but only from an overabundance of joy course!
So without further ado, here’s where they’re at right now…
The next question for me is whether I am going to go on and truly complete this pair of boards for the Logar River, or just do my touch-ups and probable second coat, glue on the reeds, and then shift gears to build the 6’x2′ Kabul river board for use along the other — Western — flank of the table. Then when I’ve reached this same point, with the base of the river channel painted, I’ll be able to pour the resin onto all three boards at the same time, so their tint, depth, etc., will hopefully all match as closely as possible. I’m not sure yet how I’ll proceed, but I’ll have to make a decision pretty soon, as these two boards really don’t have much work left to be done to them before it’s time to fill their river channels with some resin.