IT'S RAINING RESIN!!!

After a little over a year spent building, texturing and painting terrain-boards and then hot-gluing a homemade "tufts" of reeds here and there along river banks of the three river boards and virtually everywhere in the swamp of the one swamp board, as well as conducting a long series of tests on small sample river board sections, over the past three nights I finally mixed and poured the first layer of resin into all four of the river and swamp terrain-boards for my Battle of Charasiab layout.

Woo-Hoo!!!!!!

It seems to be working and that's a pretty good feeling.

I'm still at the first stage of this multi-stage "resin-ing" process, the next step of which will be a bit more complicated and fraught with a bit more risk as it will entail adding a color tint to the mix and also attempting to agitate the resin at the exact right moment late in its curing process, so the resulting disturbed surface when it fully sets will pass for the churning flow of a moving river.

That's a bit of a tall order, but I think I did enough research months ago on those small test pieces I made expressly for that purpose, so I have a decent idea how to proceed and some confidence I may be able to pull it off.  One good thing is that I plan to do 3 or 4 pours of resin (each approximately 1/8" deep), so even if I don't nail this first tinted and "agitated" pour, after it cures I'll still have another one or two more chances to get it right.

In the weeks and months ahead I plan to post my usual painfully involved step-by-step tutorial re: working with the resin, but today I just want to share some WIP views of the river and swamp boards with this first layer of resin added to them...

After the first layer cured, a couple of nights later -- tonight -- I added a thin second layer onto the 90-degree-turn Logar River section, which had turned out to be slightly thinner, due to it being slightly longer than the straight section.  I'm happy to report it looks like this additional pour brought it up to the same level as the other boards...

When this second pour for the curved board dries I will move on to the next step: the next pour for all four boards, which will be tinted with the olive drab mix of acrylix inks shown in the test piece I did a post of months ago, and will hopefully bring the depth of resin on all four boards up to 1/4".  Between now and then we'll celebrate our National Birthday of the July 4th Holiday here in the USA, so I'll take this opportunity to wish all my fellow Americans out in the blogosphere HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!