TABLETOP GAMING - "Making DESERT DUNES & River" Pt.3

Primed and ready for the final paint job! I'm giving you a sneak peak of the river segments...I'll be showing the step-by-steps later. For this post...here's the next stages of making the DUNES.

I had some left-over dry-wall mud from redoing a bathroom project...so I mixed in a little brown acrylic paint. Viola...icing for the styrofoam!

My desire was to emulate the wavy texture of wind-blown sand. So I just spread on the "mud" and dragged a plastic fork through it to get the effect I was trying for.

Once the mud was dry, I sanded down the surfaces to soften it a bit...wanted the "sand-blasted" look on the boulders.

After that, I coated everything with watered down Elmer's wood glue, to give it a harder shell.

Once that had dried, I painted full-strength glue onto the areas where I wanted to add sand, for more texture. Sadly, I basically wasted all of the time I had put into making the wavy lines in the sand areas. The "real" sand pretty much filled all of that in. Oh well...I'm making this stuff up as I go...sometimes it doesn't quite work the way I had thought it might.

Once the glued-on sand had dried, I painted on one more coating of a primer tan.

Now I'm ready to do the fun part, and paint these guys to look like rusty-red boulders on sand-dunes!

This is my last post for 2010. I hope you have a Happy New Year! See ya back here in 2011!

UPDATE!
Decided to make one more Dune this morning...a larger piece with a gentle slope. I skipped the "icing" phase of preparing the surface and just gave this one a coating of gesso. Next I painted on the glue and covered it with sand. Now it's primed and ready for the final paint job.